Wave Pillow

The Wave Pillow is made for surfers (who ride waves in the ocean). It is important for surfers to know early in the morning how good the waves are—usually between 5 and 7 a.m. , when the waves are best. The hardest part of surfing is to get up and check the waves. But if the surfer could find out while in bed how good the waves are, even without opening his eyes, he would either be really excited—and getting up would be easy (Fig. 1)—or he would not wake up at all and enjoy a couple of hours of more sleep.

The Wave Pillow lets the surfer know the state of the waves by vibrating based on how good the waves are. If the waves are big it vibrates strongly, if they are small it vibrates just a little and if the wind direction is bad for surfing it doesn’t vibrate at all.

I designed the Wave Pillow during my residency at futurefarmers [1] in San Francisco. Futurefarmers is an experimental interaction design studio with a focus on innovation and exploration. The Wave Pillow emerged out of experimentation with < www.makingthings.com > technology during “Playshop.” Playshop [2] was an open-access laboratory in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco).

When I was back in Sydney after my residency, the Wave Pillow was featured on the “New Inventors” show from ABC TV in Australia [3] and on the radio. At the moment I am looking for investors to manufacture the Wave Pillow.

The Wave Pillow fits into a category that in the ubiquitous computing world is referred to as “calm technology” and “ambient display,” a discipline that has been around in academia for quite a while but has not yet produced any commercial applications.

As an interaction designer I tapped into this discipline through the Making Things technology, a technology that opens up the “physical computing” world to artists and designers. For artists and designers, who often have poor knowledge of electronics, the Making Things modules allow one easily to control and sense things in the physical world using new media authoring applications such as Macromedia Flash or Max/MSP. This technology enabled me to read out wave data from the Internet and use it to make the Wave Pillow vibrate either strongly, softly or not at all.

Fig. 1.

Elmar Trefz, Wave Pillow, vibrator, Bluetooth chip and microcontroller, 2004. (© Elmar Trefz) Excited about the wave report.

Yet the important factor in the design of the Wave Pillow is not the technology but that it is a scenario-based design that fits a behavioral pattern in surfing culture—that is, the process of getting up in the morning to check the surf. In interaction design, products are designed around scenarios or interactions without a teleological idea of what the product is going to look like. The form of the final product evolves along the way.