The Stairs Not Taken: A Playful Experience
“The Stairs Not Taken” is an interactive installation that is designed to revitalize a space in the Architecture School at the University of Sydney.
Sector Interactive Installation, Motion-sensor device, Playful City
Tools Photoshop, Arduino, Processing
Role Visual Design, User Research, Creative Coding, Content Strategy
The challenge
To generate interest for the in-between space through playful interventions.
The DISCOvery
In-between spaces are neglected spaces that are often abandoned or unappreciated. They are less considered spaces, and just like the back alley or the narrow pathways, they are uninviting and have a minimal social presence, let alone social interactions.
The term “in-between” spatially implies a mid location between two distinct spaces. These spaces often are not significant in their spatial context. They are “the edges and leftover spaces” that “tend to unintentionally collide or create unfortunate divisions”. And that is the stairs not taken.
Design Process
After various on-site researches and interviews, we have deduced that the staircase is indeed an “in-between space” that is often abandoned with minimal trajectories.
THE OPPORTUNITY:
To capture and create the value of the less traveled stairway with the use of playfulness.
To drive people to use the under-utilized stairway
To amplify and rejuvenate the space
To create social presence with playfulness
IDEATion: From Body-storming to Brain-writing, we have developed multiple sets of storyboards to generate different possible creative solutions to the in-between space.
The idea
As our site has given people the perception of darkness, dullness, and gloominess, people try to avoid the space and have minimal interactions there. We wanted to end the loop of how people perceive the space. To break the loop, we need to bring in human existence and interactions.
Using the analogy of the thunderstorm and rain, we want to emphasize the under-utilized “in-between space”. This way, we can trigger their curiosity and get them to the area. When there’s a detection of human existence, the thunderstorms will go away as people bring in their energy into the space, pushing the negativity away.
further prototyping
Since there are lots of components in the installation, including sound system, visual display on projection, camera for motion detection, and the cloud itself with Arduino, we need to test the WIP prototype and make sure everything works together.
Changing or adjusting 1 tiny thing may affect the whole mechanism, the testing may need to start over again.
DEVELOPMENT
For the visual projection, the high-fidelity prototype uses open-source processing codes from Thomas Diewald’s PixelFlow library. Diewald’s pixel library is very complex, I have looked into his custom GUI user interface and manually control the variables of the optical flow effect to find the simplest form with an aura-like effect.
RESULTS
The digital installation has drawn huge traffic and users thought it was quite a playful design. Although half of the respondents think it was a complex installation, results also showed that the perceptions towards the space have changed as well. Users described it as more positive (“calming, vivid, interesting, surprising”), in comparison to the negative connotation (“dull, dark, quiet, forgotten”) that the space had before the playful installation.
