For many ‘connected’ people, online social activities are sometimes more intensive than the social interaction with family members living in the same house.

To make ‘off-line’ socializing more appealing to the online addicted crowed, Dutch Industrial Design student Paula Kassenaar has a solution to offer called ‘Jakob‘.

‘Jakob’ is a creative addition to the armrest of a sofa. The idea is to form a platform for a wide variety of social and nonsocial interactions: playing games together, leaving messages for one another, teasing each other or reminiscing by finding back sound snippets of memorable moments.

Jakob incorporates basic everyday technology connected through electronic yarn in a clever and innovative way. The main function is recording sound bits, short twitter like messages, for family members who can listen to it when you are not around or feed the sofa with your own personality.

The use of conductive yarns and embedded electronic modules allow bending, twisting, toying around with ‘Jakob’ which blends into the character of sofas seamlessly.

I like concepts like this one (and hopefully one day commercial products) around sofas which are kind of center point in almost everyone’s household. Spicing up sofas with a bit tech for fun or function transforms our good old sofas into a 21st Century interaction tool.

Jakob is currently presented in the Attrackz Lounge at the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven/The Netherlands.

I wonder what it may take to get all the fantastic ideas created around ‘living’ materials into consumer products.

Here is an example I found on the www from designer Danielle Sobik, a couch that interacts with people by creating dynamic patterns depending on who is sitting on it and how people sit (together) on it.

Not used, the couch has a uniform solid color blending into the living space. However, when someone takes a minute to sit down the couch starts to exhibit blue colored petals creating a blue aura around the person sitting on the sofa.

If your partner sits down on the other side of the sofa he/she will activate a blue petal patch as well. The blue color symbolizes the far distance between a couple sitting on the sofa. As soon as the two persons move closer together, the sofa starts adding warm pink colored petals with occasional blue petals visualizing the closeness of the persons.

As the people change their position on the sofa the colors and petal pattern keep on adjusting to the different positions creating a colorful, dynamic sofa cover.

Using light emitting (Electrolumiscent) technology in conjunction with trigger sensitive materials to display randomized pattern which form depending on where a person is located on the sofa. Seems these technologies are available but so far no one has picked up this concept for commercialization.

We just got a new sofa in our house and we are spending time and money to have different cushion covers made in different colors as we like to mix and match the sofa outlook according our mood and not having a dead, static piece of furniture around our home.

If I would have found a sofa like the one Danielle designed it would have been a very interesting option for us to buy. But until then, we have to keep on changing our cushion covers every other day.

[Yanko Design via StyleGuru]