Tag: interactivity

Inspiring piece of Interactive Art

Led by design team Rombout Frieling lab, Station of Being is an experimental bus station, which transforms the waiting experience through interactive light feedback and pods to lean on while waiting for the bus.

About Rombout Frieling lab

Rombout Frieling Lab is an architecture studio that focuses on design, engineering and innovation. They create environments that seduce us to behave more intelligently by resonating with our deeper needs and by using the potential of the natural world and bodies in particular. They lead complex projects from insight to implementation, with the motto of making matter move.

Concept of Station of Being

 

With electric buses starting to function reliably, cities worldwide aim to boost the public transportation experience in order to reduce car usage. However, in Sweden, bus stops are usually open-air, and people have a hard time waiting during winter as it is too cold. And a normal bus stop would not make taking public transportation seem very attractive.

Station of Being takes on a naturalistic and clean design, while being able to reflect real-time information on buses, and react to different people and buses. When the bus approaches, a subtle spectacle of light and sounds in the roof is triggered. Every bus line has a distinct signature: buses going to an old glass factory sound glassy; when voices sound the bus goes to the city center.

Hanging pods provide comfortable leaning possibilities. These ‘pods’ also keep the wind away, providing comfort in averse conditions, whilst not needing any power. By turning the Pods around, one could either create various social settings, or enjoy the surrounding nature – a need which was clearly expressed by travelers in the design process and kept the designers away from making an enclosed space.

“In this work we found, for instance, that one of the reasons why people prefer their car above the bus, is the need for privacy and the need to zone off,” 

“This is one of the reason why we invented the wooden pods that hang from the ceiling of the station – the pods allow people to lean comfortably in their own ‘cocoon’, while they can also be rotated to create different settings: social or private.”

The bus stop shows how technology, people and environment can interact to decrease the environmental impact and carbon dioxide emissions. The bus stop is designed in collaboration with RISE Interactive Umeå and will make rapid boarding possible and will also be equipped with smart solutions, free WIFI and other technological data solutions. The design work has included creating a balance between efficiency and functionality and the design itself contributes to transforming the wait for the bus into a positive experience.

Thoughts

I thought that this work is a very good example of integrating Interactive Media into everyday life. Using lights and sounds to represent the arrival of each type of bus allows people to have a more efficient and pleasant experience while doing something mundane such as waiting for a bus. The lights and pods provide good visual aesthetics, which would attract people to come and wait for buses, and good product design of the pods help to block people from strong winds, rain and snow while waiting. Not only is this bus stop an artwork, but it also plays an important role in pushing for increased public transportation, and lesser carbon footprint, as the lights in the bus stop use renewable energy.

A similar work in Singapore would be the air-conditioned bus stop at Plaza Singapura. The bus stop is sealed and there are fans blowing inside the bus stop to keep people cool while they wait for a bus. The difference of that bus stop would attract people to come and take public transportation, rather than their own cars.

All in all, the dual purpose of portraying Interactive Art and lower carbon footprint through redesigning an everyday amenity can attract many people to try it out and gradually learn about its message. Hopefully Singapore can also create projects that deal with our everyday life or change certain environments and amenities for a better cause.

Sources

https://northswedencleantech.se/en/news/umea-gets-a-climate-smart-bus-stop/

http://www.rombout.design/station-of-being.html

Station of Being is an interactive Arctic bus stop

http://www.rombout.design/

Micro-Project 3: Together-Split

F U L L  V I D EO here

B L O O P E R S here
P L A N N I N G

For this micro-project, my group and i did a story about the travels of a coin across ADM, using Instagram’s video call split-screen function. The objective of our video was to document a coin travelling from different screens and ending up in each member’s hands at a certain point of time. Having only an hour to do the activity, there was quite a lot of time constraint, thus our video did not turn up as smooth as we expected. Nonetheless, it was a good job done and the coin still flowed between each screen.

C H A L L E N G E S  F A C E D
  • Coordinating each other’s movements and timings through the video call as each of us were at different venues of ADM.
  • The receiving of our messages and instructions were sometimes delayed due to connection issues, which affected our overall flow
  • The overall planning of how the coin flows from one screen to another and deciding the order of which we must be placed on the video call.
T A K E A W A Y S
  • Despite how smooth or fast recent technology has advanced to be, if we could not connect and coordinate within this virtual space, nothing could be achieved. Thus, beyond the advantages that technology provides, a good sense of teamwork is still required to make this work a success.
  • Using a virtual space to create a story is actually harder than i expected it to be, as we had to deal with electronic interruptions and connectivity issues
  • As we are so used to having face-to-face interactions and doing physical works that are physically interactive, we are actually not as adept with technology as we think we are, and in order to create fresher and more virtual works, we must embrace this technology and its challenges.
O V E R A L L  E X P E R I E N C E
  • All in all, it was a very fun project and I would like to try works that involves this kind of unfamiliar medium

 

O U T  O F  T H E  3  M I C R O  P R O J E C T S,
1. which project did you feel you had the most creative control? Why?

I felt that micro-project 2 allowed me to have the most creative control, as we had the freedom to create any content about any topic we want, as long as it is on a crowd-sourcing platform.

2. which project had the most unpredictable outcome? Why?

I felt that micro-project 3 had the most unpredictable outcome, because we were not familiar with the split-screen function, and was not sure how smoothly our story will flow out, due to unexpected challenges such as connectivity and order of screens.

3. which project best illustrates the concepts of DIWO & Open–Source? Why?

I felt that micro project 2 best illustrates the concepts of DIWO and open-source as using crowd-sourcing techniques meant that our audeince had to take part in our artwork, thus incorporating DIWO. Also, the fact that we used 1 social platform to execute our artwork meant that our audience had to congregate to that social platform to answer our questions, thus incorporating open-source.