So in my last post I spoke about the concept of The Wall Map. For this post I am going to talk about how it is going to work and about our steps to define this.
The Wall Map will be a wall installation 4.6 feet wide X 3.1 feet tall in which we will have all the countries in the world and the walls between them. Something like this representation:
PHYSICAL COMPUTING: The user experience will be based on how these walls have changed through the years since the end of WW2, specially in the last decade. This way, using a sensor (options are a potentiometer, distance sensor etc.) the person will choose a decade she wants to visualize in the map in terms of walls. For example, if I choose 1980, all the borders that were there until this year will light up. If I move on to 2000, all the ones that were there in this year will pop up and so on. User will be abre to see also all the borders that are “planned”. One other feature we want to add is something for users to interact between themselves. We want to put 3 pairs of foot marks side by side that will trigger an action (all the light turn off) only if 3 people are standing there, and only if the 3 people are acting together.
FABRICATION PROCESS: Our first idea was to build the countries with paper origami, everything white, and to light up the borders with LEDs. There are a few references of what we wanted to do:
And we actually made a prototype of it:
So we were pretty convinced that the paper pyramids were going to work. But that was before we printed our map in its real scale in a piece of cardboard…
…and realized that we world have to deal with reeeeally small pieces of paper.
So the challenge for the past days have been to try to find the right materials to work with in terms of:
- background (options are: different types of wood, acrylic, foam cor, canvas);
- countries (options are: different types of wood, acrylic, cardboard);
- borders (options are: single LEDs, LED Strip, optic fiber, El wire);
I will talk more about the tests we have been making with materials and about the things we have been trying in the next post.