Interactive Experience Seeks to Illuminate Emotions Through Changing Sound into Color
Designers excited by new frontier of visualized human communication
Designers excited by new frontier of visualized human communication
FAQ
Q. This seems to be like an art experience. How does this relate to design?
A.
John Madae once tweeted “Design in a solution to a problem. Art is the question to a problem.” Within Prism, the team looked to design a solution to the question of self-actualization. The experience is a system in which the interaction of the piece makes the piece “work”. The piece does not serve to continue to create questions surrounding human emotion and communication, but to continue to iterate on designed systems surrounding it.
Q. I don’t understand the question this experience addresses. Can you explain further?
A.
Absolutely! This installation looks to examine the relationship between human emotion and communication by asking “What is the future of illuminating human emotions?” What this means is that we as a design team are interested in creating a speculative piece that looks to shine a light on what our interactions with ourselves and technology could be like in the future.
Q. How does someone interact with this experience?
A.
Due to the nature of COVID-19, we were not able to have this installed within the Museum of Museums as an interactive piece. To be part of our digital version, please see the "Demo" tab on this website, and sign-up to be apart of our process in live feedback sessions.
Q. What is innovative about this installation experience?
A.
Sound is an emerging technology space. Since the introduction of Alexa by Amazon, multimodal experiences have become increasingly normalized as a practical application of consumerism. However, this idea has not been applied to self-actualization and realization. With the wants of today’s society changing to be more focused on implications of actions and experiences and the increasingly complicated relationship between society and social media, we as designers must look to the future of human emotions and communication. Thus, by utilizing the emerging technology of voice-activated technology, we are moving features from being functional to foundational to the human experience.
Q. What kind of Technology does this use?
A.
This installation utilizes Raspberry Pi’s, LED lights, a two-way mirror, computer monitor and a microphone. The visitor is asked to approach the installation. When they are within a foot of the microphone, they are invited to speak or vocalize. The sound frequencies are fed through our custom code that takes the frequencies and aligns them with specific colors. Therefore the frequencies of the different noises that one makes relate to the colors that are showcased.
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For the browser Demo provided on this website, it was created in Unity and built as a webGL. We utilized voice recognition packets provided for purchase by Unity. It takes advantage of the built-in computer microphone as one uses it in the browser.
Q. What would this installation look like with more time/money?
A.
The installation would be on a larger scale, in a specific environment, such as a public space. The team feels that the piece would be scaled to accommodate a higher number of people, including more points of input from visitors, allowing many people to “colorize” the balloons as once.
Q. Why this, now?
A.
Society is changing. With the introduction of social media, multimodal experiences, and social justice towards systematic inequalities, people have changed the way that they examine their emotions and the emotions of others. Instead of looking to try and design a solution to the issues that come with this change, Prism decided to utilize speculative design as a means of creating an imagined solution. By doing this, they were able to examine the problem space from many angles and seek to explore delight as an emotional goal, rather than mediation. The intent of Light + Sound is not to create a perfect solution but iterate and imagine where this design space may grow. Who knows what it may inspire?