Tate

Tate is an interaction concept that supports kids in the switch from middle to high school by translating the easy communication they find on online social networks, into the physical world. Watch the video below to go through the usage scenario.

The Concept

The concept consists of a personal social creature, Tate, that will mutate with every other Tate you will meet in real life; becoming a visual representation of your social network.

Here you can see how your Tate would evolve with every friend you make.

The Tate lives on a Proximity Aware Portable Offline Device, that enables it to communicate to other Tates nearby. Whenever the kid finds himself alone, the Tate is able to find friends and friends of friends within proximity.

The PAPod. You can also hang it to your keychain, or just put it in your pocket.

During the first meet-up the Tate serves as a subject of conversation. When they decide to become friends they do the magic handshake, their Tates will mutate and they’ve become  physically and digitally connected. After the first meet-up, Tate will support the strengthening of the new friendship through gaming and chatting. Most interaction with the P.A.Pod is touch and gesture -based, the only physical button is used to switch between the three modes: Clock-mode, Friend-mode & Multiplay-mode.

The 3 modi of the PAPod. Each with different possible inputs.

The Tate is also able to jump on the kids’ computer and then they are able to visit their own profile on the Tate web-platform (online prototype). On this site they can check their past mutations, find the shared social information of kids they met and customize their Tate with credits they accumulated by mutating.

Background

Project Tate was developed by Industrial Design Engineering students; Casper van Huisstede, Bruno Scheele & Jasper Hartong, for a design course at the Design For Interaction master program at the Delft University of Technology. The team was invited to research and develop the project further over the summer, due to an invitation from Intel to present it at the Design Expo of the IDF. This was done in collaboration with Dr. Ianus Keller and with close contact with Intel staff and Joy Mountford. The original design brief came from the design-firm Booreiland, based in Amsterdam. Visit “team members” and “partners” for more information.