The Garden Project: Evaluation of Sand Project

The Garden Project addresses the concept of Smart Cities that focuses on the the citizens , where they are engaged and empowered to address problems in the city that are relevant to their quality of life(Lange and Wall, 2013).

It wanted to explore this approach on a community garden in retirement village Aveo to resolve some existing challenges in the area and support their activities in the garden.

The Sand Project is one of the installations designed within this context.The goal of this project is to contribute to the users intrapersonal relationships by creating an interactive and relaxing environment that will also provide information of how many visitors the garden had that day in a dynamic way.

To know more about ‘The Sand Project’ and its design process visit my previous post Connected Communities: Sand Project.

The installation consist in a round clock on a table surrounded by small plants.It has 4 layers, the top layer is cover by sand , in this layer the users can interact with it using their hands or tools to form figures or simply muss it up (this concept is inspired from Zen Gardens).

The second layer is used to separate the sand from the third layer, where the NeoPixels are.Each pixel represents a person in the garden.The forth layer, is where the Photon and Internet hotspot were located.

During the design phase, we identified Human Values like ‘feel we are part of something’, ‘find a space I can relax and disconnect from the world ’, ‘A place I can be with friends’, this helped us to find key aspects to focus our design on and support specific goals.Some aims of the project were to determine if users could understand the data displayed in the clock and if the installation could create an interactive, relax environment that enhance connectivity within the community.

The design rationale was based on insights gathered during our previous user testing feedback.We found out different understandings of what a community garden is for our target users.To some of them is a place where they want to be involve in garden activities ,for others, the space had to represent togetherness and a sense of peace.Our design rational is targeted to this second group, we wanted to “enrich physical, cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal well-being”(The Garden, 2017), our installation provides a “sensory play”, where touch(play with sand),sight (interactive lights under the sand, clock interface), sound (sounds from another installation in the garden)smell and taste(herbs around) are used to create a five-sense experience.

The setting where the evaluation of The Sand Project took place was on an open space outside of one of the buildings at the University of Queensland, where participants of the Computing society week went to observe and provide feedback of the different installations.Our methodology was to let the participants approach the installation and observe their behaviour towards it.We then provided an explanation of it and asked questions to obtain feedback.

Theory

Our project focused on supporting specific Human Values found on the design phase and uses a citizen centric smart city concept previously mentioned as bases to design an installation that will provided a sensory experience, sense of community and a relaxing environment in a community garden.

Technology

We were provided with materials to build a smaller version of the first design.A Photon was used to code the NeoPixels behaviour depending the visitors and current time. One important aspect of Smart Cities is to retrieve and shared data, thanks to this technology we could create a database that stored all the data collected by different installations in the garden.The Sand Project access this database to gather a count of visitors during a specific time of the day to display it as light under the sand. Technological challenges and practicality played a significant part to determine the final design.

Findings

We were seeking to collect behavioural data by observing if the participant felt attracted to play with the sand.From our initial observations, participants were interested in the installation.We noticed that they expected to “something happened” when they touched the sand, given that they were associating it with the data represented by the light. Some of the feedback was to use projections over the sand, vibration on touch or lights turn on when they touch the sand following their movement.

One of the issues we found out during our evaluation was that if an explanation is not provided, it creates confusion.Many users didn’t know what was the counting about, they thought it was the people that interact directly with the installation(“is it me?”) instead of an overall count of visitors in the garden.The colours of the pixels also created confusion given that they thought they had meaning or even the place where is located, made them believe the data displayed was about the plants next to it.

By analysing the information obtained during the evaluation we are looking for to enhance the sensory experience of the installation and provide a better demonstration of the data or a way to help the user understand it.One noticeable comment was its size, given that it could be a limitation if many people wants to use it at the same time.We could also find possible scenarios where the installation could fail, some comments were is it ‘weather proof’.

The evaluation provided new areas of research and design alternatives to consider if we wanted to further develop the project.