colorWAVE (v 1.0)
RESEARCH QUESTIONS: Can we use sensors to empower the public to control how they generate data while playing? Can sensors be used to produce new dialogues between friends and strangers?
PROJECT PROPOSAL: colorWAVE is a simple, elegant desktop object, roughly 4-inch cubed, that houses a set of simple sensors to track the presence of nearby individuals or groups, and a set of interactive touch sensors and LEDs that allow users to ping, or ‘wave’ to other colorWAVE devices connected to a local wifi network, seeing their responses in real time.
The design of colorWAVE is subtle enough not to arouse major suspicion, but intended to entice passers-by to inspect and even interact with its responsively lit faces. While not immediately apparent, the functionality of colorWAVE will reveal itself intuitively as users transmit to, and begin to receive pings from other units stationed across the network.
A set of four unique units, each color-coded on its top face (blue, purple, green, orange), each contain noise sensors, IR sensors, and a touch or heat-based sensor used to detect when a user touches the unit. These four units will be distributed throughout GSAPP space on Columbia campus, each acting as it’s spaces respective node in the colorWAVE experiment. One each will be located in the architecture studios in Avery 500 and 600, one in the Urban Planning lounge on the Fayerweather 200 level, and one in Brownie’s café.
The units will each passively collect information to estimate presence and density of people nearby, calculating this “activity density” as a combination of noise, heat, and movement relative to a base value.
Each sensor will display its local color on its top face, and one of the remaining three units’ colors on each of its other exposed sides (the back face will house the power plug, and will not display any color). Local users may send a ping to a specific unit by tapping on the face with the unit’s corresponding color. For example, someone at the blue unit may send a ping directly to the purple unit by tapping on the face with a small purple light. If a user taps on the unit’s top face, displaying its local color, the unit will send the ping to all other units simultaneously.
When one unit sends a ping to another unit, the receiving unit’s light that corresponds to the sending unit (for example, the blue light on the purple unit) will pulse with a high level of brightness, indicating it has received a ping. The relative length and intensity of the pulse will depend on the sending unit’s local “activity density” value.
PROJECT VALUE: Put together, these units and their nodal apparatus allows users to engage in a playful and productive conversation across a connected network of stations. The “activity density” value of each unit, live-streamed to an online database in real time, can provide the researchers with insightful knowledge about how and when people cluster in and use various spaces on campus. This may provide valuable information about how different academic programs tend to utilize their spaces, and when certain spaces are more impacted than others.
In addition, the interactive nature of colorWAVE provides some exciting opportunities. Through a non-obvious, but intuitive communication language, the sensor suite provides for a fun, novel way for friends or strangers to send one another anonymous messages, and provides a linguistic framework for them to invent their own semantic signifiers. Whether, and to what degree individuals and groups discover, intuit, and eventually utilize the simple toolset of light pulses to send information from one distinct space to another allows for the production of low-stakes, but potentially high value messaging to be developed by various groups of people. Friend groups may utilize colorWAVE to produce their own ‘slang’ or meaning from series of pulses, a la Morse code, sending messages visible to the public around them, but intelligible by only a select few.
In doing so, the sensors also provide users an opportunity to take agency over how and when data about them is produced and collected. By giving users direct control over how and when the colorWAVE produces a public change or action (i.e. lighting up), the ‘public’ is in control of its own role in the conversation between people, technology, and data.
