Bringing Strangers Together Through Interactive Design
Inspired by nature and mathematics, Patten Studio creates immersive environments that turn the strange into the familiar.
James Patten was standing in front of a 28-foot glass wall at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California when he got the idea for a new multisensory installation. “There was an incredible interplay between all of these creatures of different sizes,” says Patten, the founder of design shop Patten Studio. “The things they do to protect themselves from each other and how they interact is so stunning.”
The result was an immersive ocean-inspired environment that he created for Intel. Patten and his team used Intel 3D motion sensing cameras and chip-embedded bracelets to track the movements of visitors as they moved and gestured at a large screen. Clapping caused the projected creatures to scatter, while connected harp strings in front of the screen initiated ripple effects in the water when plucked.
Patten has spent most of his career building digital objects and experiences that feel as natural as the coordinated movements of a school of ocean sunfish, and as designers go from building for the screen to designing entirely connected environments, his work is more relevant than ever. Before he opened his studio in 2006 and went on to build interactive experiences for Intel, the Super Bowl, and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, Patten was a PhD student in the MIT Media Lab studying tangible media.
Continuing a project he began at MIT, Patten built an army of tiny omni-wheeled robots called Thumbles, whose singular interface allows for many modes of physical interaction: Thumbles can be radio dials, or wayfinding beacons, or game controls. Made of one piece of hardware, Patten’s robot could adapt its function based on its software.
The work of Patten Studio has varied from interactive window displays for Barneys to a Super Bowl performance piece that used 80,000 spectators wearing wirelessly activated LED-embedded knit caps to create a sea of colored dots that moved in tune with Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as they performed onstage. Each project is driven by a set of principles that put math and nature at the forefront. “A lot of beauty is found in nature, and if you deconstruct that beauty you’ll often find, particularly when it comes to motion, beauty emerges from very simple mathematical rules that are applied at scale,” Patten says.
The Patten Studio team can stretch from four people to 20 depending on the project at hand, and each member shares a philosophy that views computation as a design material. “The types of chips in the technology that is driving the Internet of Things revolution are making it so cheap and simple to put all kinds of simple interactive systems all over a space,” he says. “We really see this convergence between the interactive nature of a space and its physical nature.”
For a recent project, a light fixture called “Lift” that responds to motion in its environment, Patten and his team referenced a mathematical process often used in weather forecasting. “You can predict the weather by dividing a space up into a grid and letting each cell in that grid influence its neighbors,” he explains. “We used a very similar process with Lift to control the motion of the petals.” Each petal is like a square on a grid: If one of the petals start moving, that motion will influence its neighbors, and they’ll influence their neighbors, and so on. The result is a smooth, rippling motion that moves across the piece like a passing storm.
“You have a nuanced adaptation happening,” says Mihae Mukaida, Patten Studio’s creative director. “One movement initiates another. It’s also like skipping stones across a glassy lake. Each time you do it, despite the fact that it’s the same action and you’re using the same sort of stone, the very slight changes in the environment will affect it differently each time you do it.”
Using the natural world to inform digital experiences means that everything Patten Studio creates needs to consider how a project will affect an individual, its environment, and the way viewers interact with each other. “The funny thing that happens when people are experiencing something that’s really unfamiliar to them is that as soon as you get them acting silly and there’s someone next to them that they’ve never seen before, these two strangers are now having a shared experience, and that creates an opportunity for a conversation,” Patten says. “That’s taking technology in a direction that is pretty different than the typical.”
Building environments in which people can let their guards down and interact with one another is a cornerstone of Patten’s work. “A crucial element in designing interaction in a physical space is creating a feeling of delight and discovery,” Mukaida says. “When we think of interaction design, traditionally it’s a step-by-step process: You do A, you achieve B. Often we’re called in to create an experience that allows people the ability to be the authors of their own experience and feel delight in their own way. It’s a much more enjoyable experience because you’re not being told what to do.”
Using connection in the natural world as inspiration for their work not only influences what Patten Studio builds, but why they build it. “We often talk about how technology has this inherent ability to connect you to people who are far away while disconnecting you from those who are right next to you,” Mukaida says. “That’s something that we really fight against.”
To learn more about Patten Studio, check out Architecting Experience: The Future of Interactive Design on Tuesday, April 11.
