[ISEA2019] Artists Statement: Hye Yeon Nam & Brendan Harmon — Interactive Finger Puppet: How Design Encourages Children to be Performers

Artists Statement

Keywords: Creativity, DIY, embodiment, performance, physical interfaces, tangible design

In the Interactive Finger Puppet workshop participants build puppets with DIY conductive materials as a digitally augmented, creative, narrative form of play for STEAM learning. While participants play with their finger puppet characters and the stage – interacting with the designed voice recorder and player – they project their imagination into their stories. This paper explains how interactive design can augment such playful performance by connecting embodiment and creativity. It introduces Interactive Finger Puppet’s design components and explores the potential for enhancing early childhood learning.

  • Hye Yeon Nam is a digital media artist working on interactive installations and performance. She foregrounds the complexity of social relationships by making the familiar strange, and interpreting everyday behaviors in performative ways. Hye Yeon’s art has been showcased in The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C, Times Square, the art gallery Eyebeam and The Tank, the Conflux, the D.U.M.B.O. Art Festival in New York, FILE, SIGGRAPH, CHI, ISEA, E3 Expo, the Lab in San Francisco, and several festivals in China, Istanbul, Ireland, the UK, Germany, Australia, Denmark, and Switzerland. Her work has been broadcast on the Discovery Channel (Canada) and LIVE TV show Good Day Sacramento, published in Leonardo Journal and featured in Wired, We Make Money Not Art, Makezine, Business Insider, Slashdot, Engadget among other publications. She is currently an assistant professor of digital art at Louisiana State University, USA.
  • Brendan Harmon, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

We thank all the participants and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art and Knock Knock Children’s Museum education curators who organized two recent pilot workshops in Auburn and Baton Rouge. We would also like to thank the design assistant Ouyeung Shiyu.