Monthly Archives: November 2014

After getting helpful feedback from the classmates and Michael, this week our team worked on prototyping the structure and also going back to the space to find out where we can place it and how we can make the structure more interactive and purposeful.

Prototype

Following Jeff’s group feedback, we were thinking an approach might be to make around 10 small units, each with a sheet of mylar and light source. We could make little pools of light, and place them through the space (or prob one end of the space) to make a kind of light pathway and we could try different configurations to see what’s most interesting to people.

Surroundings businesses: We observed the surrounding stores and businesses during the dark and categorized them to food related business, stores, entertainment. The food related businesses were open until 9pm or later and movie theatre was open until later, which generated foot traffic. However, the stores closed earlier.

Movie goers: Around 5:28pm, large crowd of movie goers left the theatre in various direction. We could possibly use these crowd to generate interest to our structure, since there is regular movie time during the night.

Popular Area: There were consistently lots of people around Shake Shack, creating more noise on the north end of the walkway.

Walking Patterns/pathway: People generally walked to their right side of the walkway and tend to look towards to restaurant sitting area. How can we change the behavior of the people walking through this area?

Other interesting note: There were surprisingly many people walking with strollers or children on a Sunday night. It could be the soccer game next to the area, but children might be a great way to entice the adult as well.

Potential Location: Most of the area is made of glass, but there are some small wall space across from the restaurant area that could be a great place to put our installation.

This week, our prototype story is brought to you by Instagram. Please take a look at feedthefrognyc.

We unfortunately forgot to capture shots of our large signage and 5-borough scoreboard — will update this post as soon as we can get a few photos of them since they did play a role in attracting our audience!

A few things we learned:

• the toy naturally attracted young kids, but the skills involved were too challenging for them
• adults were generally more hesitant to play, but more apt at succeeding. some specific types of adults ended up really enjoying the experience, including people who love games, people who are competitive, and people who feel pride for their borough
• social proof: people were drawn to the game when they saw other people playing / having fun
• using boroughs as a point for competition was an effective way of inviting people to play the game
• there was a sense of nostalgia for a lot of the adults – many of them mentioned they recognized this game from their childhood (even though they didn’t know the name)
• a practice round was helpful to newcomers, as it let them get a good sense of how much force to use on the catapults
• maybe claiming that they could play for free would entice more people
• we had a broad range of age- groups of the participants. Kids seemed to take more time to learn the game but were more keen on playing. (something we will want to take into consideration while building our next experiment)

Sketches of a potentially grander, life-sized model:

Our prototype is projection on the bar countertop.

So tomorrow morning we will project on the kitchen table in the studio. We are going to project someone playing Tetris (their game screen), as well as the arcade game Asteroids. We made signs of each game logo to entice people to come over and watch.

We tried to prototype our project today, but sadly the projector wasn’t working, we will try again another day this week.

1. John heads to BARCADE after a tiring day of work.

2. He looks up at the interactive bar menu and knows at a glance what other people have been ordering—what’s popular.

3. He sees that the IPA is about to kick.

4.  He decides to order an IPA from the bar keep.

5/6. John sees that the bar countertop looks like the arcade game Asteroids.

7. When he puts his beer glass down, his cup destroys one asteroid into many flying pieces.

8. He mentions to the girl next to him that her beer glass took down a rocket ship. They start to chat.

9. John asks her if she wants to check out who is playing on the high score board.

10. They head over together and watch as someone is playing PACMAN on the projection board/wall.

1. Al stops by BARCADE during his lunch break. He has an hour to kill and he wants to spend it there playing a few games of PACMAN.

2. He heads straight for the arcade game.

3. As he is about to surpass the highest score, he pushes a button that projects his game onto the highest score board/wall. Everyone starts to crowd around the wall to watch.

4. After that round, he decides to take a break and order a beer. He decides on an IPA. The IPA disppears on the interactive bar menu as the keg just kicked.

5. As the bar keep places Al’s IPA on the bar countertop, the glass just misses an asteroid.

6. Al heads straight back to PACMAN for another go with his IPA in tow.

“Park Talk” Final Project Iteration #4

The simplicity of Park Talk installation incurred a significant amount of curiosities from a wide age range of passer byes in Washington Square Park.

Environment:

Date of launch: Sunday November 16th

Time of launch: 2:47 pm

Location within WSP: North West side between Arch and Fountain

Weather: 46 degrees, Cloudy, light brisk wind with late intermittent drizzle at the last 5 minutes

Duration: 30 minutes

Set-up

Our set up included the map of WSP mounted on a 60”x40” Board with a prompt asking: “Where is your favorite spot in Washington Square Park”? We provided colored sharpies attached to the board for users to sketch or write their response directly on the map.

Observation

For our fourth iteration of the prototype we sat 20 yards distance from the set-up of our prototype and unobtrusively observe the type of users, level of user engagement/interaction in relationship to the Park Talk installation and people nearby. To our surprise we learned that our installation captured interest from both kids and adults with slightly different end result in the manner in which the engagement produces for each group of users.

User 1: Kids

Adult/Family with kids ranging from 2 to 13 years of age

Kids showed curiosity and excitement when they saw the board. Anticipating the response from; either their grandmother, parent(s) or guardian’s permission to have closer look to draw on the board. In one case it was a whole family event.  Parents took delight that the kids got excited in the participation that they even took photos of their kids.

Grandmother with her grandkids (est. 6 to 9 yrs age)

Family with kids (Father, Mother, Grandmother, 3 kids- est. 4 to 7 years of age)

Couple with toddler

Pre-teen girls (est. 9 to 13 years of age)

User 2:

Adults, M/F– Couples and Single participants (18 to 50+)

We had equal level of engagements between people who were by themselves and traveling with companions taking interest to stop and look at the prototype installation. Some couples and individuals were very quick to contribute, some would pass and/or linger before seeing other engaged users before they themselves participated in drawing/writing onto the board.

One particular finding of interest was that solo participants were engaging with one another over the Park Talk installation. While we were too far of a distance to understand what they were saying we watched their body language and interaction and can only guess that they were sharing something related to either the WSP, map/prototype installation or what they were drawing. . . this particular piece of installation brought two strangers to engage in a conversation!

Couples

Solo guy + Solo girl joins

Strangers meeting strangers

Findings

Given the dreary weather and how quiet the WSP was than our previous visits we were surprised and delighted at the high level of participation from kids and adults with the Park Talk prototype installation. This prototype iteration while slightly modified and having it left unattended resulted in higher kids engagement than the first prototype launched back in late september. Also, people had natural curiosities to stop, look/read the prototype installation incurring additional interests from passer byes to participate. With a traction of one or two user again created more interests; pulling people from a distance to stop and look at the board. While they may not directly draw or sketch we observed people either made exchange with other users or with their travel partners.

*For family with kids– the discovery of the Park Talk installation along their path offered serendipity and delight for the kids to engage free-form with the larger audience.

*For adults: WSP public space, intervened by this installation enabled a sharing which allowed a conversation/engagement by two random people. In conclusion, we felt that our Park Talk prototype installation was a success drawing curiosity, delight and enabling natural/genuine conversations.

As a group we were delighted our Park Talk prototype brought smile and playfulness to the public space in Washington Square Park in such a cold and dreary day.

Final Park Talk Board Contributed by Washington Square Park Visitors

Close-ups of some of the drawings