Pillows, the type which are used for decoration, to soften up our homes, come in zillions of shapes, designs and styles to express personality, mood, dreams – every and any emotions we would possibly have.

MIT’s Ambient Intelligence Group members Sajid Sadi and Pattie Maes in collaboration with Amir Mikhak created the Relational Pillow which is adding an interactive, relation enhancing  dimension to a pillow.

The Relational Pillow is fitted with light and touch sensors, along with a Wi-Fi connection allowing to send emotions given to the pillow to someone far away.

The touch sensors let you literally draw a smile with your fingers on one Pillow and send it to another Relational Pillow. The information on one Pillow is transmitted to another, simply using the lights inside.

The Pillow acts as a pictorial communication channel between two people, perhaps between long-distance friends or couples.

Unfortunately the Relational Pillow like many other interactive pillows, is just a concept design and I am still waiting for a first commercially available product as this form of interactivity of a pillow would be much more appealing for me to have one around my couch unlike those ‘at every cost’ cute looking but static pillows.

Fitting pillows with technology goes back to 2001 as far as I could find out when Annie Lovejoy made an ‘exploration of emergent and redundant technologies, the proliferation of components / hardware and data which is intricately embroidered in a tapestry of systems’ resulting in the first interactive pillow concept.

Since then we have seen pillows that talk, pillows that play music and many variants of light up pillows creating atmosphere in our homes.

The interactive pillow developed by the Interactive Institute (Sweden) in 2005 proposes a pillow to be used as communication of feelings between people separated over long distances.

Pillows, especially the ones decorating our living room are cuddled and hugged to calm down, protect while thinking about someone special. Most of the time we are not even aware of this but I can ensure you it is the case.

Using a intimidate object as the pillow represents for communicating feelings to loved-ones or significant others living far away, family members living abroad or just out of town is an sensible and creative idea.

The pillows are connected via a internet based communication platform. When one pillow is being cuddled and hugged the gestures will be translated into glowing light pattern and transmitted to the other pillow far away. The receiver will so see the beloved one is thinking and feeling about one right now, sending a warm, sensible ‘hello’ to the other.

The pillow illumination comes from invisible to the naked eye, electroluminescent wires woven directly into the textile pattern of each pillow.

Considering the advancement of WiFi in our homes over the past 3 years, this interactive communication pillow, as proposed by the Interactive Institute, could be a nice enrichment for our home decoration and in staying in contact with our loved-ones.

We had our share on interactive pillow coverage like illuminated pillows or sound pillows but the Pling Plong pillow created by Silje Softing sticks out by it’s playful use of ’soft’ low tech to give an twist to the story telling for small children.

The pillow itself tells the bedtime story ‘relieving’ you when absolutely needed as you have to finish a project on time from the story telling for your little one.

Pling Plong is a media player integrated into a pillow shape for story telling and sounds. It is designed to stimulate children´s imagination and interest for books.

The Pling Plong pillow is a design concept but if you are interested to get such pillow you can check out Silje’s blog where she documented the creation of the Pling Plong pillow and similar pillow concepts targeted towards children’s imagination power which the grown ups have lost over the years.

It dosen’t have to be always high-tech to create magic and I am sure the Pling Plong pillow will be the next best thing after Mom and Dad for story telling.

[via Yanko Design]