Team: 6 members collaborative effort by all team members
Time: 3 weeks
Approach
In order to communicate to museum visitors the design team wanted to evoke an emotional response from our users that allow them to understand their direct impact of their environmental decisions on their surroundings. The design group focused on this idea to create our display for the museum with the user in control of their resources and therefore responsible for their actions. The aim of the project is to show the user a direct connection between trash in water and its cleanliness, by letting the user remove waste from a symbolic river.
Concept
The concept aims to display how toxic waste in the water is creating water pollution. The user can choose to remove the waste from the water in order to make the water clean. The goal of the concept is to make the user aware of how humans pollute the water and also how humans are able to make it clean by their own actions. Rather than just discussing the water pollution, a tangible concept might make users more aware since they actually interact with the concept in a physical manner. The toxic objects in the symbolic river in this project are a symbol of how humans pollute their environment in various ways and the ability of museum goes to remove the objects illustrates that humans are able to take an action to make the environment clean again.
Design process
Idea generation
The project started out with a brainstorming session within the group in order to come up with ideas which were suitable for the theme of the exhibition at Världskulturmuseet (World Culture Museum). We were also aware of the time constraint of the project and collective knowledge of the group when coming up with different orientations of the project.
Our initial idea was to create a symbolic river using LED’s and connecting the color of the LED’s to a recycling bin standing on top of a scale. This would then allow the users to impact the color of our “river” by removing trash and placing it onto the scale. However due to last minute technical difficulties and short design time adjustments to the design have been made even though the concept has remained the same.
Implementation:
Our final concept was built using an Arduino Uno to process the input and also display the output which were connected to a Ultrasonic sensors inside a recycling box and eight meters of RGB serial LED strips in order to make an illusion of a flowing river. The LEDs were powered through a DC power component.
Ultimately the LED’s had three different stages of color in relation to the amount of trash read by the sensors inside the recycling box. During the first stage the trash box is empty and all LED’s are therefore green. In the second stage there is one or two trash objects in the recycling box and the LED’s are a mixture of blue and green. For the last stage the trash box is FULL and the LED’s have all changed into a blue color to demonstrate that the river is clean since the trash has been removed.
Sketch of system setup made using Fritzing software
Ultrasonic sensors as input
To read how much of the trash that was out of the river and put into the recycling box, ultrasonic sensors was used in the box. Because of these sensors, there could not be any water at the installation.
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Realization
The work was presented at the World Culture Museum and visitors came up to interact with the device. When they came upon the river they were presented a green river filled with trash and when the user put the trash in the recycling bin the symbolic water became blue. According to the visitors at the exhibition, the concept was easy to understand and use, and its purpose was perceived clearly. The bottles, representing trash, expressed interactivity and tangibility, and the users quickly understood they were supposed to pick the trash up. The concept was considered as being very suitable for children, since it evoke a feeling by a simple interaction. However, some users expressed a desire of deeper complexity within the concept. For example, connecting the sense of cleanliness to other dimensions, as the sound or connected to life around the river. The concept was considered as predictable, since the user could guess what would happen when picking up the trash. It would benefit of having some kind of surprising element, to add complexity. Our aim of the green color representing toxicity was not experienced the same for all the users. Since green often is used as a positive color, and additionally since the recycling box was green, the green stage of the river could be experienced as a positive stage.