“bench” as an interactive element

The story begins with main character’s sitting on a bench and continues with his thoughts, observations associated with his environment. Bench is a medium where the writer of the story uses as a place where characters think, express their feelings and communicate. What is the relation between sitting and thinking and how can this relation be used as an input for a bench design? This relation has been defined with regard to sitting postures. Thereby, the design idea has evolved to a bench design which can be manipulated by different sitting postures.

There are three rectangular prisms related to the number of characters in the story and the rectangular prisms have different heights which represent hierarchy between characters. Each rectangular prism have a plate on the top of it which performer can tilt to up and down and this attribute provides different sitting postures.

In terms of interactivity, bench has been designed with the ideas of both helping performers to express emotions and augment the feeling of the environment described in the story. Sound and light are two outputs of the bench in consequence of performers tilting up or down the plate they sit on the top of the it. Light effects have been obtain by placing LED system inside the prisms. There are three switches on the bench; the one in the middle works when the performer sits straight and the other two work when performer sits and tilts left or right on the bench.

By different sitting postures in other words tilting left or right the plate on the top of the bench, some sound and light outputs are obtained. These outputs are: changing the colour of the light, gradually becoming darker or lighter of the light, blinking of the lights, speeding up or down the sound and blinking of the lights, turn on or off the sound.