re:tangent -Remote Tangible Engagements.

Social interactions between individuals are a substantial and important aspect of personal well-being and family cohesion. However, families are increasingly geographically separated, due to job requirements, international marriages, health issues, or political circumstances. While there is a substantial body of research on how to support remote social interactions by means of technology, they are mainly facilitating video-mediated communication. Nevertheless, audio and video communication over distance lack qualities that are inherent to co-located social interactions, many of which are associated with the physicality of our world.

Therefore, this project aims to research how to enable tangible remote social interactions between grandchildren and grandparents of dislocated families. It focuses on interactions that can be characterized by a tangible/ physical engagement over distance, either adding to audio-visual communication or as interactions that exclusively enable tangible engagements.

Central research questions include, but are not limited to: “How can technologies support engaging intergenerational interactions?  What are the effects of multi-sensual remote interactions on dislocated grandchildren and their grandparents? What kind of rich and new forms of communicative play are possible that result in play environments that merge the digital and the physical world?”

The contribution of this research is that it will advance knowledge on intergenerational relationships over distance by focusing on the physicality in technology-supported communication beyond dominant two-dimensional, audio-visual technologies.