AHO Logo

Birgitta Cappelen

Associate professor

Email
birgitta.cappelen@aho.no
Website
http://birgittacappelen.com/

Biography

Birgitta Cappelen is Associate Professor in Interaction Design at the Institute of Design at AHO. She has a broad education and experience in the field. Among other things, she is a Master in Industrial Design from AHO, and was one of the first to work with Interaction Design at AHO. In addition, she has a BA degree from the University of Oslo with a curriculum consisting of History of Ideas, Philosophy, Computer Science, Media and Communication Studies, with MA courses in Media Aesthetics, Semiotics and Interactive Media. She also has a BA-level in Business Administration from the Norwegian Business School (BI).

Birgitta has worked continuously with Interaction Design (user interface design) since 1985, on a number of technological platforms, in a variety of technologies and application areas. She worked for many years with the development of large strategic, financial and trading systems in manufacturing, banking, retail, publishing, power and stock trading on a variety of platforms (DOS, UNIX, Windows, Web, mobile, etc.). From the early 1990s, she has worked with multimedia (audio and video as media elements in the user interface), for instance museums and adventure centres.

Birgitta has started three companies within design, technology and business development (New View 1993, Interaction Design 1997 and Creuna 2001).

Since 1998 Birgitta has worked in the field of “Tangible Interaction” (physical and tactile media) primarily in a research context. She has been employed as a research fellow at School of Arts and Communication (K3) at Malmö University, and researcher at the Interactive Institute’s Narrativity and Communication Studio in Malmö and at Design Sciences at Lund University (IKDC).

An important theme of Birgitta’s work within tactile media is to explore the potential of hybridizations. Hybridizations between Design and Art, between art installations, toys and furniture, audiences, users, and creators, products and services, hardware and software, use and abuse, etc. She calls what she creates ”fields”, not ”things”, ”objects”, ”products” or ”Art”. Fields filled with potentiality.

The key to most of Birgitta’s work in tangible media is cross-media co-creation. Since 2000 she has worked with two composers in the group MusicalFieldsForever. The group has exhibited its interactive, tactile sound installations in a number of places, e.g. at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Rooseum in Malmö, Museum of Modern Art and the House of Culture in Stockholm, the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture (DogA) in Oslo, in Copenhagen, Berlin and Japan. Read more about MusicalFieldsForver.

At AHO Birgitta has taught Service Design, Interaction Design, Tangible Interaction Design, Musical Interaction, Sensorial Interaction, Universal Design and E-textiles.

Until 2017 Birgitta mainly worked in the research project RHYME (rhyme.no) , which was a continuation of the work she has done in tangible media. The RHYME project goal was to improve health and quality of life through the use of tangible, musical, social and collaborative media. Improved health for families with children with multifunctional and severe disabilities. RHYME was a joint project between AHO, the Norwegian Academy of Music /Music Therapy/ Centre for Music and Health, and the University of Oslo / Department of Informatics. The research project was funded by the Norwegian Research Council through the VERDIKT programme.  Birgitta and her colleagues currently work on developing this technology and the health promoting approach on technology further, in new collaborations (Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy, Nursing, Public health)  and towards new user groups (e.g. elderly, persons with dementia).

 

 

Projects:

Design Research Mediation|designBRICS – A global design network addressing climate change|RHYME

Publications (47)

2020

Article

Is There a Proper Way to Teach Design Thinking? Empirical Evidence from Design Thinking in Education

  • Latterman, Christopher|Arntsen, Erik|Flaten, Bjørn-Tore|Fürst, Neele|Holen, Jannicke|Cappelen, Birgitta

Since about a decade ago, design thinking has become a prominent topic in the scientific and business world. In order to keep up with global competition, design thinking has proven to be a valuable concept for assisting companies to innovate their products, servicesand processes... Read »

2018

Book chapter

Cultural Artefacts with Virtual Capabilities Enhance Self-Expression Possibilities for Children with Special Needs

In this paper we discuss how new combinations of technology, art and culture enable children with special needs new ways to express themselves. UN declaration (UDHR) states “All human beings have the right to participate in cultural life, enjoy art…”, later including children (CRC) and persons with disabilities (CRPD)... Read »

Book chapter

The Health Promoting Potential of Interactive Art

In this paper, we argue for the value of participatory and interactive art, to increase the quality of health and health promoting technology, for children with special needs. UN states through several conventions that everyone has a right to take part in art and cultural experiences, also children and people with disabilities, because art is an important value in our society... Read »

Exhibition

Polly World, Interactive Installation

The RHYME research project at the Research Council of Norway, participated and contributed in several ways at this year’s EHiN conference. The conference, with the title “Shaping the future of health”, was arranged in the Spectrum hall in Oslo, from 14th to 16th November 2016. The EHiN conference is the largest conference within e-health, welfare technology and health technology in Norway... Read »

Multimedia

Polly Land, Interactive Installation

Polly Land is a large wired Interactive Landscape in the Polly World. Polly Land has three arms and an embedded projector for a close and intimate relation to live video and dynamic graphics. One of Polly Lands arms has a Microphone for voice input, one has a Camera for live video and one arm has a RFID-reader for selecting and playing music in several ways using Scene Cards and Tag-Things... Read »

Multimedia

Polly Fire, Interactive Installation

Polly Fire is a sleeping-bag-shaped mobile wireless Co-creative Tangible. Polly Fire has a RFID-reader (the white velvet triangle at one end) for selecting and playing music in several ways. By choosing a RFID tagged Scene-card (looking like a CD cover) the user can select the music and accompanying visuals he likes to listen to and play... Read »

Multimedia

Polly Planet, Interactive Installation

Polly Planet is a large ball-shaped mobile wireless Co-creative Tangible. Polly Planet has a RFID-reader (the white triangle on the top in the picture) for selecting and playing music in several ways. By choosing a RFID tagged Scene-card (like a CD cover) the user can select the music and accompanying visuals he likes to listen to and play... Read »

Multimedia

Polly Ocean, Interactive Installation

Polly Ocean is a big banana-shaped mobile wireless Co-creative Tangible. Polly Ocean has a RFID-reader (a white velvet triangle at one end) for selecting and playing music in several ways. By choosing a RFID tagged Scene-card (looking like a CD cover) the user can select the music and accompanying visuals he likes to listen to and play... Read »

Book chapter

Designing Sound for Recreation and Well-Being

In this paper we explore how we compose sound for an interactive tangible and mobile interface, where the goal is to improve health and well-being for families with children with disabilities. We describe the composition process of how we decompose a linear beat-based and vocal sound material and recompose it with real-time audio synthesis and composition rules into interactive Scenes... Read »

Conference paper

Vocal and Tangible Interaction Crossing Borders

Our voice and body are important parts of our self-expression and self-experience for all of us. They are also essential for our way to communicate and build relations cross borders such as abilities, ages, locations and backgrounds. Voice, body and tangibility gradually become more important for ICT, due to increased development of tangible interaction and mobile communication... Read »

Book chapter

Vocal and Tangible Interaction Crossing Borders

Our voice and body are important parts of our self-expression and self-experience for all of us. They are also essential for our way to communicate and build relations cross borders such as abilities, ages, locations and backgrounds. Voice, body and tangibility gradually become more important for ICT, due to increased development of tangible interaction and mobile communication... Read »

2012

Conference paper

Designing for Musicking

Music is a universal language we communicate through and with, cross cultural, functional and social diversities. The health potential of music has been thoroughly and scientifically documented during the last 15 years. With the term “musicking” the musicologist Christopher Small expands music from being just a noun to a verb, from an aesthetic object to an action... Read »

Conference paper

Openness for Diversity

The ideals of Universal and Inclusive Design often lead to a “one-size-fits-all” solution, and a design full of compromises, not really attractive for anybody. Who has the right to define who should be included in the inclusive design? Who defines who is excluded? People are diverse. Diversity is the beauty of democracy, which is the root of Universal and Inclusive Design... Read »

Exhibition

Reflect

Reflect is an interactive tangible sound installation that will premiere at Music Makers (http://musicmake.rs/category/artists/) on September 14th 2012, at Prince Charles in Berlin. Music Makers was curated by Create Digital Music, PLATform and SemiDomesticated. The creators of the installation, MusicalFieldsForever is a group of Artists and also a Project... Read »

Article

The Empowering Potential of Re-Staging

In this paper we present and discuss the empowering potential of restaging interactive art installations. We build on an approach, where we divide the staging process into four levels of staging (potential, strategic, tactical, dynamic), and in Umberto Eco’s sense open, to four categories of choices (genre, temporal, spatial, actorial) to perform on each staging level... Read »

Conference paper

Expanding the role of the instrument

The traditional role of the musical instrument is to be the working tool of the professional musician. On the instrument the musician performs music for the audience to listen to. In this paper we present an interactive installation, where we expand the role of the instrument to motivate musicking and co-creation between diverse users... Read »

2008

Conference paper

Same but different, composing for interactivity

Based on experiences from practical design work, we try to show, what we believe, are the similarities and differences, between composing music for interactive media compared to linear music. In our view, much is the same, built on traditions that have been around for centuries within music and composition. The fact that the composer writes programming code is an essential difference... Read »

Conference paper

To challenge textile with music

In this paper we present some of the challenges we approached in order to design and develop interactive experience environments in textile. Our interactive environments are created to facilitate communication on equal terms through music, between children with severe disabilities and their families... Read »