What if wind could operate a digital interface?
I was having my usual morning coffee at the farm yesterday, looking out at the wind turbines in the distance as their blades slowly turned in tandem with the wind. It got me thinking about the qualities of wind. It’s invisible, yet it has an omnipresence – grass bending, trees moving. At its fiercest, huge branches peel off the Eucalyptus trees.
It got me thinking – what if we treat wind not just as weather data, but as an interaction agent for interfaces?
Most digital systems assume a human (or increasingly AI) interacting with an interface. What happens if we remove both from the loop and instead have wind be the agent driving the digital system?
So I started prototyping this idea and wrote a basic script in Python to translate wind states into words and phrases. In the video below I talk through how the idea emerged and the concept of wind as a non-human interaction agent.
Still very early thinking and prototype, but it already starts to suggest an interesting direction for more-than-human interaction design.
The video is a little long (about 14 minutes), but for anyone interested in the thinking behind it, I thought it might be worth sharing.
More updates later as I work through this.
