Prototype 1

I chosen Common area of 90 columbus (New Jersey) as the location of my sets because it is a reletaively a more “secret space”. In first week, I only focused on finding a “public space” but forget to think about more details for future implementations.By chosing this place, I was quite pride that our group is the only one who didn’t chose a totally public place. But I seem so wrong by looking back now.the restriction accessibility of people in this area represents less interaction possibility between people and our instruction sets.

This place contains a great environment, lots of trees and places for people to enjoying time. In order to observe people’s action in here,I did a AEIOU table:

Also, in order to find our all the interaction actions could happen in this place, I did a brainstorm form:

After did the brainstorm, I believe to find out people’s activities area is the key, so here is the mapping:

After all the researches, I have found that there are lots children in this place, maybe I could do something more catoon and joyful for them to generate interactions.So I decided to do a photoplate for them to taking pictures with:

and put it outside:

However, people interacted with this set just under my expectation, I think that is because my targeted user: all the childrens are locked in their room doing homework and cannot get out at weekdays’ evening.

So I decide to change our location to a “more public” space, after investigations, we decided Medison Square Park as our final location

Prototype 2

This time, after lot’s of research and observations. I have chosen Medison Square Park as the location to set up my installation. Here is a park that is not too big, just taking 1 block in the downtown Manhattan. Lots of people traveling by and is a little place for relaxing in this busy city.

So, just like usual, I start my observation and research for this place. I did an AEIOU again for this: When I doing AEIOU, I find out a strange point. I found that many people look down to their phones when sitting on the bench or sometimes when checking their phone while they are walking. but here I got one exception

What happend to people? the scene is just beautiful and the sky with cute little clouds is so lovely. All the beautiful things are being ignored, **what can I do to let them know that actually the sky is more good looking than their phone?

So I decided to make something that augments interaction between people and the surrounding environment, people and nature. Make people rethink the relationship between city and the nature Target reaction and feelings: Emotional and playful

I completely discarded the previous prototype, did a brand new one, that both of us satisfied with. Actually we fight a lot in the location choosing, and about prototype ideas.That’s a tiring process
but it is great that we finally get to a middle point. I made a group of ballons using helim, attched to something represents city (I thought of Lego but we finally decide to use box because of the price),using some leavs hang in the middle to remind people to use them as handle to interact with this installation set (for example, pull the ballon down). It my first time to blow ballons by my own, quite scary and interesting experience to me though.

In this process, I made the ballons first, and then the bottom box. the ballons looks great at first, clean and clear in a really “cloudy” shape.

The process of form ballons together to looks like cloud is really a time-consuming thing, and we have to be survillance of perturb ballon to fly away. Actually I fall down several times when using chair as ladder to reach flyaway ballons.

but as the time goes by, in just about 1 hour, ballons fall down because of less of helim

When we doing on-site, the wind was strong so we have to shorten the wire and put the box aside the path in case the balloon were blown slanting getting in the way of visitors.

Although the process is quite painful and seems people didn’t get the underlying meaning of our instruction set. We were happy because people like it, at least we brought happiness to them.

Interview after Interaction 1

“ I pretty like it. It makes the park looks more gregeous.”

“It’s kinds of low, I have to squatted down for shotting pics” He also made some suggestion after we illustrated our idea to him “My suggestion is to make balloons in a bigger size, with more helim, so they will be much lighter than now.”

“My son loves it! Thank you so much. You made his day!”

“Those fallen leaves are great idea. If there is only a bunch of balloons, it might be too ordinary”

“It might be troublesome.. Those fishing wires are invisible but firm. They might be suffocated themselves by using that”

Summary Great amount of interaction between people and people as well as people and environment. Interaction time is longer than we thought Get lots useful feedback

For the next step reconsider the form of the box and find a better way to represent the city reconsider the form of the object flying above reconsider the connection between the box and flying object higher the balloons

Prototype 3

This time we still did a big change on our prototype. Because in the critique session, teacher pointed out that people interact with our instruction set only because people want to play with ballon. So we spend a lot of time in thinking about our intention and what we can make to let people still have interest to interact with our instruction set simultaneously

So we made a lot modification including: 1. higher the ballons: Last time, the lines tangled a kid and that makes me realize that if the ballons is too low, that could be troublesome to pedestrians which is not expected. 2. fix the ballons: Last time, because of the wind, our ballons fly all around the place and looks messy because of that. This time, we fix it using three fixing points, it will not moves a lot because of the stablity of triangle principle 3. being more specific about our intention 4. add more interest and interaction elements

after that, we decide to clarify our intention to one point: to make people look up. Sometimes less is more.

some of our ideas

Idea 1: using colorful strip and things that not supposed to appear in park to form our interaction set. I quite like this idea as it’s not an ordinary idea. It can bring people think of the meaning of that set and also fulfill out intention. However, it cannot to be realized because the park security don’t let us put anything on the trunk of trees.

idea 2: Story-telling ballons: Make each of the ballons become an element of a complete story. People need to find and interact with each other in order to view the complete story. This one is quite good because it helps with both the interaction between people and our instruction set and between people themselves. However, it cannot to be realized because we didn’t achieve an agreement inside of our group.

idea 3: Flourescent painting ballons: Using flourescent spray to draw a painting, in the dark night. People have to hold an ultra-violet light to see that. The insteresting thing is people can only read a little part with ultra- violet a time, cannot see the full painting at once. That definetely add the interaction aspect of this intruction set. Also, in my mind, I want to include some reflective papaer in the bottom, when people using ultra-violet light and make the painting shows, the image will show blurry in the reflective paper. However, it still cannot being realized because I think our flourescent spray seems corrosive: when we use it, all ballons poped up.

at last, because we were running out of time, we have to give up all our ideas and just using color spray to do a painting in our ballons.

On-site is always having some differentiation with imagination, result would be much better if stick in one idea for three weeks. Also, I learned a lot about how to deal with group work. I almost never had large group work project before, and I got lots of experiences this time. Group works is quite different individual work, communication is really the key to deliver a success work!