Human Patterns

This session is facilitated by Antti Halme

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About this session

“Human Patterns” is gently structured play, where participants’ primary task is forming shapes using their body and whatever items they find in their environment.

An overhead camera above the participants streams a bird’s-eye view video feed to a calibrated program allowing comparisons between a heavily filtered image from the camera and a set of target shapes. Displaying both the view from above and the target shape should enable several forms of interesting matching play. This should be entertaining at various levels of difficulty, and for a range of abilities. After an introduction and plenty of free play, there could be a short debrief discussion about the experience per participant group.

I imagine the session as a drop-in sort of activity. I could commit to hosting the play for a couple of hours, say, and possibly I could recruit others to operate the system as well, as needed.

Goals of this session

I imagine “Human Patterns” as an invitation to play, both with other people and a software system. A successful play session should encourage thinking about collaboration in a digital medium, about spatial awareness, about computer vision, as well as fun applications of cyber-physical systems. On another level, the session could lead to a discussion on the nature of surveillance and perhaps inclusiveness in the form of systemic disregard for anything but the coarsest of human features. This could be an evolving system as well: participant ideas and contributions are welcome, and could potentially be explored in real time.