creating connection

The Creating Connection studio partnered with the Science Gallery Melbourne to develop exhibition installations that foregrounded embodied interaction. Students worked in groups to make design proposals for the gallery and to build and exhibit a functional prototype in the RMIT MDIT Building 50 studio space. These installations were to engage visitors through their bodies, senses, and physical presence rather than through screens or conventional interfaces. The students investigated what connection means when it is felt, performed, and materially enacted between people, between bodies and environments.

The studio was grounded in two converging theoretical frameworks: embodied interaction and new materialism. These closely intertwined contemporary theoretical frameworks converge on the idea that human experience and knowledge are deeply rooted in the physical, material world. While embodied interaction focuses on the body's role in social and technological engagement, new materialism rethinks matter itself as an active, agentic force. 

Combining embodied interaction with new materialism meant that interaction was no longer thought of as just a user acting on a tool. The challenge for students was to create vibrant assemblages that positioned the design of interactive installations as part of a dynamic network, where connection was enacted rather than represented. Creating contexts where meaning emerged through the encounter between bodies, objects, and environments, not through explanation or labelling.