I’ve been thinking about how to blend participant interaction with the other goals of the project, specifically “having the project be meaningfully different at different times”. That is, we need a way to blend participants’ interactions (ie “Participation“) and the current environment (ie “Immediacy“).
Not a trivial task, but here’s how I’m thinking about it. There are three “categories” of inputs:
- Participants: motion, coordination
- Time: day of week, time of day
- Environment: temperature, wind/dust, Trained Operator
So, from our participants, we get “motion” around each sepal which is the “low bar” for the project to “do something” and generally Participation. If the motions from multiple participants are aligned, then we get “coordination”, which is the “high bar” for the project to “do something great”.
From the clock we get time: what day of the week is it and what time of day is it right now? We want to craft a project that brings us through a plant’s growth cycle in a few days, so Monday is “green and budding” and Wednesday is “going to seed”. Also, running a mister at night is silly, and running LED lighting daytime is silly.
From the environment, we get Immediacy. Again, running the mister at 35F is a bad idea, but liberally running the mister at 90F is a great idea. If wind/dust picks up beyond a certain point, we’d shut down mister/fog effects and bring up the lighting and sound as a beacon to wayward travelers. Finally, a “Trained Operator” is specific to the context of flame effects–by regulation, we can’t shoot fire without the physical attendance of a person that’s trained to use the project.
So, how does everything work together? Well, we can look at the interactions using a directed graph. An initial interaction by Motion interacts with Day of Week and Time of Day to impact Sound and Lights. Further interaction yielding Coordination interacts with Time of Day, Temperature, Wind/Dust to control the Mister. If there’s a Trained Operator present, then a similar impact on Flame/Fog.
Directed graph of interactions between inputs (Participants, Time, Environment) and outputs (Sound, Light, Flame/Fog, Mister)
Typically, we’ve built projects that only focus on Participation–there’s no context for the project beyond what the participants do. Here, we’re extending into Immediacy, blending the two kinds of inputs to make a meaningfully different interaction. Again, our goal is “having the project be meaningfully different at different times”.
Peace,
Mike
