Show&Tell
A glove that translates sign language into text — proposing that the future keyboard was invented long ago.
I — The workConcept
Show&Tell is a glove that translates sign language into written text. It was conceived as a speculative answer to the coming age of wearable computers: everything else would shrink and soften, yet the keyboard would remain a clumsy rectangle, foreign to the way people actually communicate.
Sign language is physical, expressive and engaging. Adopting it as the input for wearable devices is a practical proposal and a poetic one — taking a language developed by a marginalised community and offering it to everyone as the most natural interface there is.
II — DocumentationPlates
III — The storyMaking & meaning
In 2011 Google Israel invited us to imagine a use for its new Android accessory kit. We chose to revive an old dream instead of inventing a new gadget, and spent the following months learning to read the hand.
The glove was presented at Google Developers Day and Google Zeitgeist in 2012, reported on Israeli national news, and circulated widely online — less, we think, as a product than as a gesture about who gets to define the future of communication.