Wouldn’t you have loved, as a child, to have a friendly pillow that would tell you stories? A pillow that looks like he would cuddle you all the time and when you put your head on him, he would start singing songs? I would… and thankfully somebody had the idea to actually create this.

Too many companies develop toys for children from a technological perspective. They come up with gadgets that are very popular for a short time, but are than discarded. Fortunately there are still creative people who understand what children really want and care enough to put much effort in creating positive experiences, putting value above easy money. One of them is Silje Softing, who created Pling Plong: “a media player for stories and sounds, placed inside a pillow. It is designed for the home environment and is meant to stimulate children´s imagination and interest for books. Its low-tech appearance in form, material and its simple functions makes the pillow seem magical. The fact that you can lay your head on it makes the toy very calming and it is meant for relaxing play alone.”

As a child I loved listening to stories. Right next to my bed I had a tape deck where I would play one of the story tapes in my collection. Than I would close my eyes and imagine being in the story. I would have loved to  have a pillow like this. The great thing about the Pling Plong is without a doubt the attempt to make children relax and listen to stories more often. These days children are coming in contact with television and computer games at an increasingly younger age… it’s good to try to counter this with something that is low-tech in appearance and at the same time gives something appealing and interesting to children.

As a designer myself I’m really curious how children respond to the Pling Plong. How does the Pling Plong show to children that it can tell stories? At what point does it start and stop playing and telling? When I’m tired of a story, how can I get a different story? These are things I’m really curious about. And what level of interactivity should it have? I can imagine that parents can be in control, without the child knowing it. Maybe the Pling Plong should have a few (remote) controls, by which it will act in a different way: One of the biggest problems is getting children to bed. Maybe parents should be able to change the mode of Pling Plong, after which it starts singing bed time songs and is slowing down more and more, motivating the child to sleep. Wouldn’t that be great?

From October 2008 to January 2009 the Milwaukee Art Museum hosted the first exhibition in an art museum. It was an intuitive, digitally developed interactive art. Here are two video’s to give you an impression of the exhibition.

What I find wonderful about interactive art is the fact that next to being art, it’s often also an area of play and discovery. It’s a great source of inspiration for everyone who designs human-computer interactions. So hopefully there will be many more exhibitions like this to come.

More about the exhibition can be found here on the website of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

This week MSN launched their own sci-fi series called Kirill. Normally that wouldn’t be really special for Johnny, except that it claims to be the next generation in online TV. It wants to create an interactive experience between the series and the people who watch it.

The story is about an environmental disaster caused by the particle accelerator at CERN (Switzerland). Since then strange things are happening… researchers being arrested, people in hiding and special forces showing up. As a viewer you can watch the episodes, which last three minutes each. There you get information as the director intended it. But it’s barely enough to understand the story and exactly enough to feed your need for more information. And there the interactivity starts.

Besides the episodes a lot of information can be found on other places. The storyline is intertwined with different interactive tools from MSN. For example a few journalists are blogging on Spaces about strange incidents in town, showing video footage and photos of researchers being kidnapped. And you shouldn’t be surprised when you’re suddenly contacted via your instant messenger. You decide which information you want to see or read, and create your own conclusion. And it works: while I was watching one video on a blog I was so intriged that I started watching related movies, constantly getting more curious about the events that occured.

It’s good to see a new online television concepts showing up, experimenting by giving me a lot of freedom to dive into the story. I think it’s too early to tell if it will be a success… One thing that is difficult to accomplish is giving people a sense of freedom and influence, but on the other hand managing to keep the story on track and manageable. I see is a big relationship with story-based computer games, which try to give you the feeling that you are actually creating the story around you. A lot of these games failed at this, so I hope the creators of Kirill used those learnings. The first perfect example of a story-based game has to be Half-Life.

I hope this online tv concept will succeed and pave the way to more interactivity in storylines. And I have to admit that it is a great marketing action to promote Microsoft services and products, such as MSN and Silverlight.

Watch the first episode: