The initial assignment we got from Born Digital immediately presented us with a lot of freedom. They gave us a theme to work with, 'Threshold', which is the theme of Freemote this year. Besides that they presented us with suggestions coming from earlier works of themselves, and just a single solid demand: What we would be going to create, whatever that would be, should focus on interactivity.
This opened a world of possibilities for us, as we would be able to do whatever we wanted to do in the exposition space (and as you can see below, it's huge!). The demand that it be interactive was hardly necessary, as our team is filled with game designers and other people who want to make nothing but interactive pieces.
With a briefing by Born Digital on the very first day in the new semester, we started off very smooth. The first ideas and inspirations were passing through the group when we viewed the festival venue in the second week of the project. A few days of broad concepting followed, as practically anything was possible at that point. We soon narrowed down however, as we realized our schedule was tight. On top of that, working on concepts without much guidelines is great for a few days, but doing it to long may give you lots of ideas, but little depth. We wanted to get into testing and creating material sooner rather then later.
We pinpointed a few often returning elements and made some early choices of direction regarding these. We decided what threshold would mean for us and the installation, and as such choose to work with the following themes: searching for (physical) boundaries, making the public explore their own limits and those of the piece, and the possibility to find and cross the breaking point of these limits. It was clear early on that we wanted the installation to stimulate interaction between participants, and that we wanted them to discover the installation out of curiosity in an almost childlike fashion of exploration and play.
After this we split up the tasks ahead, making the design team responsible for designing the experience and interaction of the installation, while the art team and the sound team explored the newly defined themes in visual and auditory aspect. I joined the ranks of the design team that set out to create three different concepts with different forms of interaction, and pitch these in the fourth week, when we would have a meeting with Born Digital. Two concepts materialized rather quickly, but the third took some effort as every idea we had seemed to slip back to one of the other concepts. This resulted in us fleshing out the two first concepts further every day, which was good for the depth of these ideas, but troublesome for the process. Because every new idea was unintentionally geared to the two far more defined existing concepts we quickly deemed them not promising enough before having really explored them. We eventually defined a third concept from ideas that were roaming around the team for quite some time and were thus ready to prepare the pitch.
In the meantime the art team had moved from exploring the overall themes to working on the visual exploration of the concepts we were fleshing out and creating material to clarify these in the upcoming pitch. Besides a nicely decorated office wall this resulted in new insights for the design team, and a lot of images, of which you can view some below.
The sound team hadn't only set out to find auditory ways to communicate the themes but was also working from the start of the project with the designers to explore and test ways of using audio interactively. As user participation will be vital for the installation, it was clear from the start that we had to come up with ways of making the users influence sound and visuals and the audio guys took a head start in experimenting with this.
What is interesting about the way we worked these weeks is that the design team set out with guidelines to work on the concept in a smaller and more effective group. At the same time however, the art team and sound team were drafting concepts in their own fashion by generating material and discussing it within their teams, and in the entire group. This forced the design team in a good way to constantly reflect on the concepts while creating and defining them as they had to communicate these to the other group members.
It also allowed for new input from outside the design team itself which is great to keep you from making the same circles over and over again and eventually getting stuck. In a way, the art and sound guys were a constant source of inspiration for the design team, which in turn gave the other teams ideas to work with. It also helps in the dialogue, as an image or music often communicates an idea clearer then words and can serve as a platform to discuss a concept over without miscommunication. I think it's valuable to note the way this worked out for us, as all too often traditionally more production based facets like art and sound design are involved later in the process and can't serve this role.
In the fourth week we were ready to pitch the three concepts we had formed to Born Digital. These were named 'Elastic', 'Organism' and 'Tetherball'. I will give you some insight in these concepts and the process we went through after the pitch in my next post.
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