Tabby: Designing of coexisting entertainment content in everyday life by expanding the design of furniture

We investigated the new entertainment content that seamlessly mixed into our everyday life in the coming ubiquitous era. For this purpose, we attempted to expand the possibility of furniture with interactivity. First, we evaluated the entertaining quality of such "coexisting" entertainment as "comfort" and "pleasure" in everyday life and, consequently, we focused attention on the furniture that is the most familiar objects around us and brings comfortableness to our living environment. We constructed the framework of the "coexisting" entertainment content design that consists of "sustention" and "concurrency" being based on the original quality of furniture and then implemented a prototype named Tabby. Tabby is a "coexisting" content that has both the function of a lamp and the entertaining quality of an interactive content. We also examined "Tabby" by SD method and found its possibility of amplifying the pleasure without decreasing the original comfortable quality. In this paper, for revealing the possibility of "coexisting" entertainment content, we describe our design framework and its expanding ability.