Designing content for narrative, embedded devices in public space
“Content is king!”, is a cite often stressed in web industry. It describes concise how important content in contrast to the interface and interaction design is. Media facades, public displays and installations in public space struggle also to understand how content provides values for the city. Especially low resolution displays make it difficult to convey any meaningful message. Often blinking content for capturing attention seems to be the only option. In this project we explore extensively the narrative potential of low-resolution displays. We will use existing prototypes created by prior project students in order to explore the limitations of those and explore possible content dimensions such as generative content, narratives, and metaphors. To evaluate these, little iterative deployment studies in the city of Weimar will be done.
Based on these explorations and experiences, we develop in cooperation with the project “GridEye: Advanced infrared camera low cost sensors “ a new narrative public device and apply our experiences made with low resolution displays.
For prototyping content students will:
- Create prototypes to test content ideas, by using projectors or the existing low resolution prototypes from prior projects.
- Explore different contexts present in the city.
- Implement the content by using the Arduino / Processing prototyping environment.
- Test the content ‘in the wild’.
- Build new narrative devices for the GridEye sensor.
For CS&M students this also means:
- Building on an existing Java SWT application.
- Extending a distributed system based on the Atmega328 (= Arduino, http://arduino.cc) microcontroller that meets the requirements for situational public interfaces. The hardware used will be the Open Source Hardware panStamp (http://www.panstamp.com/).
- Rapid deployment of prototypes "in-the-wild".
- Creative use of technology
For the media architect or product designers:
- Experience technical realities and building robust, functional prototypes.
- Learn more about dynamic / time based mediums
- Understanding electronics and software as digital material
- Dealing with interaction in public spaces, situatedness, multi-user, ...
- Collaborate with media informatics students.
- Creative use of technology
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