Street Lights -
Interactive skate curb
Visual feedback to augment a skate experience
In this project we investigated how to incorporate interactive artifacts in an urban environment. The city of Malmö, Sweden, was our arena of design and its skateboarders our lead users and target group.
We designed an artifact based on our theoretical claim that a digital interactive layer put in a public space must balance between being enough engaging and still respecting the integrity of the place as well as the activity. When designing interactive objects for a physical activity, such as skateboarding, it's importand to keep the feedback at a level that does not interfere with the core activity. The feedback should be open ended and fun and without set rules. The "players" should instead be able to make up their own intrinsic rules and values. The concept prototyped was an interactive curb adjusted for skateboarding, testing user behavior with visual feedback.
Street Lights
Visual feedback to augment a skate experience
IN SHORT
Brief: Interactive objects in public spaces
Approach: Augment skate experience
Solution: Interactive open ended skate object with visual feedback
Tech: Arduino
After thorough research about skateboarding and skateboard culture, done with interviews and workshops...
...we made a few concepts, from wich we chose one. This one was based on giving visual and audio feedback to the skater. As the concept was suppose to work in an urban environment with other people than skateboarders we decided to only go with lights, since the audio could be enoying for passers by.
The curb consist of a light rig with high intensity LEDs, and photoresistors sensing where the skateboarder is traveling along the pipe.
The final prototype
We made a couple of user tests to get oppinions on witch type of visual feedback would work best for different occasions.