Croissant, a cushion keyboard

Croissant, a cushion keyboard

Croissant, a cushion keyboard

As COVID 19 has worsened and deprived us of touch, we rely more on cyberspace to communicate with each other than ever before. So, 'touch experience' should be considered in any new forms of interaction in times of isolation.
How do we bring a physical touch embodying human warmth to digital communication?

Croissant is a fully functional 'cushion keyboard'. The croissant shaped cushion embraces the body and guides us towards an intuitive touch experience. It allows us to type via intimate interactions such as squeezing, tickling, hugging, and by resting on it. The visual appearance of the resulting type corresponds to the touch interaction: letters appear wavy, they change colour, and they fade away after a few seconds. Croissant wants to encourage us to engage more closely with digital communication by letting us reach into cyberspace and explore it with our sense of touch.

While electronics usually require standardised tactile interaction and tend to focus on the efficiency of the tactile interaction, Croissant has a soft mechanism that enables us to explore alternative values in our interactions with human-to-machine and human-to-human: softness, slowness, subtleness, vulnerability, embodiment. Also, the soft, tactile interaction reminds us of other possibilities for relating to one another, besides efficiency: taking care, taking time, being responsive, affectionate, empathetic.

By speculating about alternative forms of touch interaction which embody human warmth in the contactless lives, Croissant wants to explore a potential role of the soft-touch experience in enabling a caring and empathetic communication in cyberspace.

To make hardware(a cushion keyboard), I used cotton fabric, conductive fabric/thread, and Arduino Nano 33 BLE board. About size, the width is around 40 cm, and the height is around 24cm.

https://youtu.be/FvfyCTP8VtU

https://minjusong.com/

I am a designer based in Seoul and London. I graduated in Ma graphic communication design at Central Saint Martins in 2020. I am is interested in exploring how our thoughts and behaviours are shaped by technology that we have taken for granted in everyday life. In my work, I experiment with the possibilities for empathetic interaction in human-to-human and human-machine relationships.

Solo Project.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA