The Giving Button
The Giving Button was a project I completed with a group for the CMU course "Possibilistic Design." The Giving Button aims to complicate the notion of the push button. Digital interfaces reject their own materiality, suggesting a certain fantasy of endless use with no strings attached. But all physical entities suffer wear and tear. The Giving Button accentuates this reality by tying the mechanical to the soft and fleshy. Our push button bruises. It allows itself to be poked, prodded, and abused—and yet at the very same time, it gives back to the other party with pulses of comforting heat, yielding more and more warmth the more it is injured.
The Giving Button was a 2.5 week project, made with Yasemin Rees, Grace Kolosek, Chloe Sun, and Shenai Chan. Yasemin and I were responsible for prototyping and making the bruising button portion of the project. Shenai did the electronic component part of the project, wiring and programming the heating pad.
