DECO3850 is the capstone of the UX Design major. For this course, we were tasked with building a physical interactive exhibit which would be on display to the public at the end of the semester. The theme for the project was “The Future Everday - novel interactions for speculative futures.” We were tasked with designing and building a physical, novel interaction that embodies how we envision technology’s role in our future, everyday life. We needed to utilise the concepts of playful, open-ended and speculative technologies as well as designing with critical, social and human values in mind. It’s important to note that with this project, we were not tasked with researching and solving a problem, instead creating an installation to observe how users interact with technology and its role in society.

How Slow Can You Grow? is the installation we created that combines the concepts of slow technology with a collaborative experience in order to create an experience that urges people to slow down and reflect on the message the installation is trying to communicate. We had three fundamental questions that we were seeking to answer with our installation - “How do we make a technology that gets people to reflect on their societal impact?”, “Will people put effort into a collaborative interaction, not knowing if other will do the same?” and “How do people react to technology having a ‘soul’ or ‘life’?”.

Our installation used lights, sounds and projection to create an experience that simulates and visualises people’s impact on the environment. The installation has three core components - the sprossen mascots, the tree as our centerpiece and the interactive floor projection. We used motion tracking, as well as various environmental sensors in the sprossen to determine how harshly users are treating the installation. We then used Unity to take this environmental data to generate a response, either positive or negative, for the users. For this project, I was again responsible for designing the brand of our project, including the logo, posters and other printed material used for the exhibit. I also worked a lot on the proof of concept prototype for our project and designing the interactive floor projection, which initially had me trying to create a MediaPipe Python script to enable computer vision but - due to technical issues - ended up using a different solution called LUMOplay.

More information about the project and related concepts can be found in the video and research paper below.