An intractable exhibition piece where visitors ‘fill up’ a table with their drawings
to feed color-hungry robots.
Role: Creative Technologist, Designer
Tools: Interaction Design, Arduino, Rhino, Digital Fabrication
An interactive exhibition piece with three mysterious devices that feed off colors.
Capturing the essence of children’s drawing, the piece encourages to fill the drawing
table with more colors for an immersive relationship with these devices. However, each
device has special personalities that alter the colors they feed on differently... This was displayed
at WQED Pittsburgh.
Filling the page – before and after of the table from beginning to end of the exhibition.
While the paper had colors to initiate interaction with the devices, it was the addition of
other people’s drawings that made more interest in the overall experience.
Fostering collaboration and human robot conversation through doodling.
The goal of this piece is to bring people back to the childlike joy of doodling through
these color devices. People would co-create drawings and mix new colors to experience
through these devices.
Creating more interest through embedded personalities.
To create more exploration amongst the audience, each device had an encoded personality
that changed how it outputted the colors it detected, encouraging using all the devices
on the table.
An iterative process to create a design for children, large groups, and fun.
I wanted the device to be accessible from all angles, leading to its cylindrical form.
The device itself centered around the Adafruit color sensor and Neopixel LED’s.
This informed the design of the device and build affordances for its “sliding” action.
Making the device durable for an exhibition involved working with tolerances
to make the entire device friction fit, so that it could hold its form when in use
and require no glue for any components.
Every iteration involved testing with people to identify potential for new features and
making the experience enjoyable in an exhibition.
Future Considerations.
I want to start experimenting with interactions between the devices themselves,
possibly if they get close to each other their lights can affect each other, or maybe
mixing colors of light on another device. While multiple people can use these devices,
it is still fairly individual and I would like to see the opportunities for co-creation.
