Interactive installation & research

The Buttons Elevator


As technology has evolved and advanced around us, the way we interact with objects has changed as well. If in the past the action was straightforward, purely physical, and characterised by the outcome you wish to achieve. Today almost all actions have this bridge, the bridge of buttons. The world used to be filled with buttons in all shape and sizes, large buttons used to operate large machines and the small ones vice versa.

Today we use different kind of buttons, code buttons that are operated through flat screens. And if those flat screens are something we people communicate through on a regular basis, does it means that our communication is flat?

In the elevator project I tried to draw parallels between buttons with different shape and sizes to human interaction and situations. During my research i wanted to transform a conversation into an array of different buttons; each one would take part in a complex and interesting way as in conversation. To take out and deepen the conversation more effectively with physical feelings then a flat screen can.

The Elevator

The awkward meeting point, the elevator, where we encounter others in an awkward environment has an array of buttons, each with an appearance that suggests its function: intuitive. Each button began a sequence of projected visuals from three projectors simultaneously, with accompanying sound. The feeling inside the 1.5 ㎡ elevator installation is quite realistic. With this interaction people generated new and interesting communication, a buttons conversation.


I first made an installation of the elevator at Holon Institute of Technology, and then also installed it at the Tower of David venue in Jerusalem, an antiquities site.


“Egyptian shadoof”

In the old times, many different movements were needed to be done in order to get water


A Button conversation

Instead of using the same unremarkable physical action to send our friends our thoughts, with our thumb or index finger on a flat screen, I wanted to imagine that we have more options, a big control panel of movements and actions through which we could communicate. The object of our communication, a friend, would also receive the communication in a more interesting physical way through this different interface.

As part of my early research for this project i collected and categorised a mass collection of different buttons: