YouieCho-LookingOutwards-08

Website: http://www.katehollenbach.com/

Kate Hollenbach leads the design computation team at Oblong Industries that is based in LA. She works with a lot of gestural interfaces and HCI applications and products. A recent work is phonelovesyoutoo, which is an application that captures video from the phone’s front and back camera, and the screen, watching the user’s activities. She creates an interesting perspective of what mobile devices would see when they observe human bodies, as well as looking into the physical and virtual planes of human presence. In this lecture, she explains her projects with very good supporting materials. When she presents her works, it is very good that she shows the demos from a perspective that the user would actually be in, so it helps visualize what the experience may be like. Also, she gives a good context of where the project is, and what kind of future stages the project is moving into.

A work of Kate Hollenbach that I admire is Infinite Scroll. It is an installation with videos generated from real video capture of user’s scrolling through social network feeds. It is very interesting that mundane rituals can turn into interesting colorful content. It feels familiar because of the scrolling action, but it comes across as something novel because of the way that the scrolling action is expressed.