Category Archives: Final project – week 5

After getting helpful feedback from the classmates and Michael, this week our team worked on prototyping the structure and also going back to the space to find out where we can place it and how we can make the structure more interactive and purposeful.

Prototype

Following Jeff’s group feedback, we were thinking an approach might be to make around 10 small units, each with a sheet of mylar and light source. We could make little pools of light, and place them through the space (or prob one end of the space) to make a kind of light pathway and we could try different configurations to see what’s most interesting to people.

Surroundings businesses: We observed the surrounding stores and businesses during the dark and categorized them to food related business, stores, entertainment. The food related businesses were open until 9pm or later and movie theatre was open until later, which generated foot traffic. However, the stores closed earlier.

Movie goers: Around 5:28pm, large crowd of movie goers left the theatre in various direction. We could possibly use these crowd to generate interest to our structure, since there is regular movie time during the night.

Popular Area: There were consistently lots of people around Shake Shack, creating more noise on the north end of the walkway.

Walking Patterns/pathway: People generally walked to their right side of the walkway and tend to look towards to restaurant sitting area. How can we change the behavior of the people walking through this area?

Other interesting note: There were surprisingly many people walking with strollers or children on a Sunday night. It could be the soccer game next to the area, but children might be a great way to entice the adult as well.

Potential Location: Most of the area is made of glass, but there are some small wall space across from the restaurant area that could be a great place to put our installation.

This week, our prototype story is brought to you by Instagram. Please take a look at feedthefrognyc.

We unfortunately forgot to capture shots of our large signage and 5-borough scoreboard — will update this post as soon as we can get a few photos of them since they did play a role in attracting our audience!

A few things we learned:

• the toy naturally attracted young kids, but the skills involved were too challenging for them
• adults were generally more hesitant to play, but more apt at succeeding. some specific types of adults ended up really enjoying the experience, including people who love games, people who are competitive, and people who feel pride for their borough
• social proof: people were drawn to the game when they saw other people playing / having fun
• using boroughs as a point for competition was an effective way of inviting people to play the game
• there was a sense of nostalgia for a lot of the adults – many of them mentioned they recognized this game from their childhood (even though they didn’t know the name)
• a practice round was helpful to newcomers, as it let them get a good sense of how much force to use on the catapults
• maybe claiming that they could play for free would entice more people
• we had a broad range of age- groups of the participants. Kids seemed to take more time to learn the game but were more keen on playing. (something we will want to take into consideration while building our next experiment)

Sketches of a potentially grander, life-sized model:

Our prototype is projection on the bar countertop.

So tomorrow morning we will project on the kitchen table in the studio. We are going to project someone playing Tetris (their game screen), as well as the arcade game Asteroids. We made signs of each game logo to entice people to come over and watch.

We tried to prototype our project today, but sadly the projector wasn’t working, we will try again another day this week.