Making Impact - Honours Research Project

At the beginning of my Honours year, I knew I wanted to make something that involved advertising, interactive design, and climate change. And I knew I wanted my interactive design to be in the form of a large, public installation – which was easy to participate in, and didn’t require any special equipment on the behalf of the user.

I spent three months researching into these three different fields, brainstorming and experimenting with pen and paper at the same time. I took a lot of inspiration from previous interactive installations who used a ‘natural user interface’, an interface that uses the limitations of the body as its inputs.

I learned new knowledge theories to help me put education into my installation, and experimented with several different interaction and teaching methods, through visualisation, photo manipulation, rough technological prototypes using a webcam and Processing, and even small group activities – including an exercise that mapped people’s perceptions of their climate change appropriate actions on a scale of green to red.

My final work involved an animated video visualisation, as well as a functioning installation using an Xbox Kinect, Processing, and a short throw projector, which reacted as people walked past. This project didn’t aim to solve the world’s problem, but to explore and provoke conversation of the possibilities of this technology for the future, as more than novel.