#Blog 17: Final Project-ESSAY
Food except 🐑
This is focusing on the situation almost every one locked down in Shanghai are experiencing—hunting for food every day. People are anxious about whether they can get enough food and things that are normally within reach now become luxuries, for example fast food and bubble tea.
Our project features a human holding a fork to hunt for the fallen food from the sky. People will have 20 points of LIFE at the beginning and a total of 140 seconds for one single round. LIFE will increase if the little character’s fork touches the food and it will decrease if it touches the sheep (because in Chinese, sheep is “羊yáng”, which pronounces the same as “阳”, which means positive). As shown in the sketch, I will make two large buttons with pillow-like texture to control the character to move left or right and use the pressure sensors as inputs to allow people to ease their negative emotions brought by the situation by punching on them. The most difficult and time-consuming part is the coding, so we plan to finish the first draft of code before May 1 and revise it before May 7. During the week of May 2, we will finish the physical part.
In my preparatory research and analysis, I have come up with some criteria of what a successful interactive art project need, such as cyclic, individuality and uniqueness, sustaining and relating, creative input and output formats, etc. I think our project will be able to meet these criteria. From two of the projects I researched, Melting Arctic and Disruptive Devices, I realized that solid device can facilitate better interaction than simply digital device like LED screens or other light and sound effects, like the project Melting Arctic. Something 3D and touchable is really important to make people feel engaged. So, in my project, I am going to use “punchable” pillow instead of keyboards or buttons that requires less action. This project aims to lead people into reflecting the situation they are in with a sense of sarcasm and at the same time, ease their emotions.
April 25, Jingqiao, Younian Liu