Tara Winkelmann - Teleflirt

Teleflirt

Team project 5. semester BA.

In a group of eight, four artefacts were designed and built. They are intended to serve as alternative means of communication for interpersonal relationships. The focus was on creating physical interfaces to help teenagers and adults communicate more meaningfully over distance.

All four Teleflirt artefacts

During the peak of the COVID-19 lockdown, we were faced with a challenging question:
How can we connect people across distance while placing greater emphasis on emotional communication—something often overlooked by conventional methods?

This team project, part of our 5th semester, was designed to give us initial experience in project planning and execution. In smaller sub-groups, we developed different concepts and brought them together within a cohesive framework.

Programming was done in p5.js and Arduino. Messages and signals are sent via web sockets from one artifact to another.

Our final presentation was done online, but we had an article featured in the Page magazine in the July 2021 issue.

Official website: Teleflirt

All artefacts:

Pathfinder

Door To Door

Telletter

Take My Hand

Telletter:

A way to transmit messages of the heart to another person.

Made by Michelle Benthin, Nadja Troscheit and Tara Winkelmann

Telletter creates and sends voice recordings as small messages, like a kind of letter.
The artifacts only work in pairs and both participants have an artefact each.

To send a message, one first opens the front flap and moves the blue flag on the right up. The voice recording will now start automatically. When you have finished speaking your message and closed the flap, it gets sent to the other device. The message is forwarded over the internet. At the recipient artefact, the flag lifts as a sign of a received letter.
When opening the mailbox, a small thermal printer prints out the message.

The flags on both devices now go down, and the cycle can start again.