Heidi Hinder discusses her craft + technology residency at Watershed in Bristol, UK on Humans Invent:

The project focused on creating new ways of exchanging payment via physical gestures in an attempt to make technology a more interactive experience. It also served to promote physical contact with other humans in an age when the digital is replacing the tangible.

Hinder explains, “I was interested in trying to bring people closer together through technology and how that might be possible given that people are often quite isolated and absorbed by it, so I used technology as a mediation to bring back human to human interaction.”

Using RFID tags and readers, Hinder created four different physical gestures that could act as payment including hugging. In this scenario the customer and server wear an RFID tag and reader respectively on their tops and money is exchanged when these come into contact – the easiest way for this to happen is by hugging.

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