Project Title
When the Eyes Meet the Mind
Project Statement of Purpose
For the final project, my teammate and I aim to develop an interactive system that enables the user to express what the see and how they feel about the classic fine art piece, Mona Lisa. We intend to build this project for a general audience interacting or visiting an art space. We decide to build this project because both of us have observed the problem that often times, when we visit fine art pieces at museums, we simply observe those pieces in their static forms. Besides, people might feel intimidated or less interested, because they think they cannot understand art pieces without substantial knowledge in the fine arts. The interactive experience with art pieces only leads to selfies or photos posted on social media at the end. Different people might interpret Mona Lisa or The Starry Night in dramatically different ways, but it is hard for us to communicate such feelings and interpretations verbally, let alone visually.
We hope that by creating this interactive system, the audience are able to alter the visual representation of an art piece, like Mona Lisa, so that they are able to visually communicate what they see from an art piece, and how they feel about those pieces. In terms of research, our project has been greatly inspired by projects like “Speaking Through Emoji”, which enables users to use a console and visually communicate through emoji expressions; projects like the Disco Dog also enable us to think about how our interactive system can better facilitate human connection, as a central part of my definition of interaction.
Here are two sketches of our project idea:
Project Plan
To operationalize our project in the following weeks, we will set up three stages to build out our projects, as the following:
- Preparation and Research (April 24- April 27)
- Conduct research on physical computing projects that involves button consoles. Find inspirations on interactive projects that better facilitate the communication between audience and fine art pieces
- Observe how students interact with artworks at the NYUSH gallery and interview students about their experiences and feelings when visiting museums
- List out all materials we will need for our final project
- Rapid Prototyping (April 28- May 4)
- Build our first prototype of the console box
- Write the code to connect buttons and
- User Testing and Iteration (May 5- May 11)
- Conduct preliminary user testing with our friends, observe how they interact with our project, and ask for their feedbacks. We will ask questions about: what was confusing to them? What was their initial response when seeing the change on the screen? What they think would be cool to add or change?
- Collect user feedbacks and observe user interaction during the user testing session in class.
- Iterate our project according to user feedbacks
- Final Presentation (May 12- May 16)
- Present our Final Project to the class
Context and Significance
Our final project idea has been inspired by “Speaking Through Emoji”, “Disco Dog”, and a “Cat Petting Simulator” projects that we have researched. “Speaking Through Emoji” project gave us the inspiration to build a button console that can enable users to generate various combinations of inputs sent to the computer, so that the machine can send out various kinds of inputs about Mona Lisa. Cat Petting Simulator also inspired us to think about how we can create the interaction through a physical console and digital screen. “Disco Dog” project specifically enabled us to think about whether our project, “When the Eyes Meet the Mind” can facilitate human connection with one another, with objects and the surroundings. We hope that our interactive design project can make fine arts more accessible and engaging for the everyday audience/visitors. Hopefully, it can break down the barrier for people to express their creative thinking and emotions about art pieces.