The Idea

Today Camilla and I had a mass brainstorming session over giant mugs of tea. After sitting in silence for a while with no inspiration we finally came up with the idea. We decided the industry sector we wanted to design for would be cultural/entertainment more specifically, art galleries. We want to create something for an art gallery's cafe or bar rather that in the exhibits. Cafes are usually quite bland, although they make the effort with avant-garde furniture the overall effect is often clinical and unwelcoming.

Our idea is to create something innovative, creative and most importantly entertaining to be set in these cafes. We want to use a range of phidgets in our design including touch sensors, vibration sensors, sliders, a joystick and a light sensor. The idea is to have a screen mounted in a table with the phidgets lined up below the screen. Each phidget will create a different effect of moving images on the screen, by playing around with the phidgets and using them in different orders the animation on the screen will change as the different images overlap.

We will create the animations and the links to the phidgets using actionscript 3.0 in Flash. As neither Camilla or myself are experts in using actionscript this idea will work quite well, it gives us the flexibility we need if we come across problems with actionscript. We will start by creating very simple animations in Flash which will allow us to start on the scripting quickly, as we become more confident with the actionscript we can expand our animations to become more complex. By doing the project this way we are giving ourselves the freedom to leave the animations simple if our scripting work causes us problems.