Better late than never...right?
Well for this project, the task was written up as follows:
This exercise prompts you to propose, develop, deconstruct and implement an idea based on the principles of an interactive, heliotropic smartsurface. The smartsurface concept should constitute a set of functionalities that otherwise exist in 3-dimensional space, collapsed into an ostensibly 2-dimensional space, thereby gaining additional functionality and/or appeal.
With that being said, to simplify we were asked to create an interactive smartsurface, which reacts, uses, or responds to the sun (heliotropic). Our initial idea which drastically fell through involved a redevelopment of the "facade." In particular the facade of bar, in our heads, a place which uses no power, or little to no power, during the day and switches the switch for a handful of hours at night. Soooo, why not design a facade covered in solar panels (solar energy harvesting, heliotropism), which could help to collect and harvest energy to power the bar during open hours of business. When the bar opens, this wall of solar cells reveals another layer embedded with LEDs and interactive software helping to not only indicate strong activity outside of the bar but in addition, a means to attract more business inside. The exterior surface would become fully interactive. Some precedents we were inspired by:
Digital Wallpaper: Strukt Design Studio
You Fade to Light, rAndom international for Phillips Lumiblade
Hyposurface
From this initial idea, we further developed a more cohesive, feasible, and rather interesting project. We took the same ideas of light, interaction, and solar charging, but implemented this into a very different form. No longer were we stuck designing a facade, but rather an art installation to be set up in the University of Michigan's central campus diag. The design was a simple cube, with removable acrylic panels, which could be self designed to light up with LEDs. An array of these cubes, varying in size would be distributed around the entire diag, creating new means of access as well as travel throughout. The cubes respond to the people walking by via motion sensors; LEDs were programmed to delay in the pattern they turn off. Ideally what would occur is when walking/running/galloping, etc...the lights would trail along the face of the cube with you, as though leaving behind a mark of your existence. This installation would help to initiate new ways to communicate between people and the way we interact with objects, with art, with technology.
