The Role of Traditional Shadow Play on Creativity in Interaction Design

Interaction design within the area of Human Computer Interaction has been around at least the last half of the twentieth century. However, some argue that interaction design has been a part of the human experience much longer. Throughout history, different cultures did have different techniques for the art of interactive performance, in parallel with the developing technology. These techniques were quite different from today’s computer interfaces and our way of looking at it. It is believed that, today, if we can understand the philosophy behind these techniques of different cultures from different parts of the world, we can make an important improvement in producing designs that go beyond the limitations of two-dimensional interfaces for interactive media design. From this reality, we face the challenge of reinterpreting the early performance techniques by using the advantages of today’s technology. This challenge can be developed in such a way that it may be possible to add new dimensions to our concepts of interactive media design by examining the techniques of the art of show of past cultures. There are many examples in history to answer the articulated challenges. One of them is the technique of “shadow play” which is quite parallel to interactive media. In this paper, by looking into the typology of the traditional “shadow play”, the challenge of developing these new concepts for interactive media is examined by 10 projects which belong to 40 European Design Students who joint European Interaction Design Summer School funded by European Union ERASMUS Intensive Program. (Please see projects at http://www.khas.edu.tr/idss and please see detailed philosophy at http://idcourse.hku.nl/)