Just before the end of 2012, we had the pleasure of interviewing the guys over at Greece-based controller creators Vavdo Interfaces. You can admire their beautifully crafted minimal controllers both further into this interview and on their website.

Controllerism.com: What are your founder’s names? What were you guys involved with before starting Vavdo Interfaces?

Vavdo: We are Giorgos Stefanou, Karolos Gakidis and Vaia Ougiarou.  We come more from an artistic background rather than a corporate one, so we’ve been involved in a number of art projects, like electroacoustic music concerts, new media art installations and performances. Besides that, some notable projects of ours were the Petcord netlabel, an experimental electroacoustic music netlabel than runned from Giorgos Stefanou and Olliver Wichmann, as well as the Di.p.art (digital physical art) festival, founded by Giorgos and Vaia and oriented towards experimental music, interactive art, performances and installations that were using technology in some way or another. Karolos has an audio engineering background as well and at the moment is also a sound designer and responsive systems developer at Beetroot Design Group (a multi award-winning design agency) and he’s carrying out projects like interactive  installations, application design, real time and non-real time computer graphics, music composition and others.

C: When did you start your activity?

V: Our research on new physical interfaces started back in 2009 when studying at the Crete Institute of Technology, but we only made our project public during the final year. Our first controller, the Vavdo A1, was officially available for orders in June 2012. After a fast stock-out of the first small batch we worked for an upgraded version of the A1.
The whole upgrade was centered around a new communication protocol between the micro controller and the computer and the ability to send OSC messages to device RGB LEDs. This resulted in a rewrite of the VavdoAdopt software drivers, which handle all serial data and translate them to Open Sound Control and MIDI. VavdoAdopt for Mac OSX is a native lightweight application written in Objective C and C++ that allows to easily change the names & ranges of OSC. For MIDI messages you can adjust the control change values.

C: What motivated you to start this activity? Is it the same thing as what drives you to continue doing this now?

V: We started designing controllers because we needed something more like a musical instrument, rather than a childish toy or something that offers lots of handles that often don’t inspire creative solutions in composing or performing. The next step was to think globally and see that we had the same needs as many people all over the world that they were doing music, VJing , light-jaying, sound engineers, light designers (and some that really took it just for the design!) and the goal was to help and inspire them to make a breakthrough in their projects.
We never stop thinking about new controllers and engines, because of our everyday needs revolve around working with creative projects. Actually right now there’s a big queue of ideas that are just waiting to come to life, right after we’re satisfied with the progress of the current controller, the Vavdo Alpha. We are doing our best to finish them shortly.

C: Can you offer some details behind the Vavdo A1, its simplicity and the approach you envision for it? Why so minimal? It reminds me of Tehn’s arc. Was there any inspiration from there?

V: We believe that in some situations it is better to have a small number of controls than to have a lot. If you look at the world of musical instruments you can see a span of different approaches to the number of controls available. The Alpha controller is designed with a minimalistic approach as a way to encourage the design of more sophisticated mapping.
We are big fans of the monome controllers and the first time we saw the Arc we actually felt that we were on the right path in our way of thinking and more designers would follow in such ways. We never felt like competing with the monome or other contemporary interfaces, it’s actually the opposite – we think we can make a great community targeting the evolution of ways in which the artists express themselves.

C: What are your future plans, aims, and ideas for the coming years?

V: One of our main goals is to support and help the users of our products and promptly resolve any issues that may occur for each different setup. We also plan to continuously research and develop inspiring controllers, sound and video engines, handy tools like APIs and applications. These are some of the reasons for the high price (which many people are complaining about), but it’s the only way for us to keep on going.

You can check out Vavdo on their website.