Take the Elevator is an interactive box put in public spaces to provoke interaction.
At the time there was a campaign at our school, promoting healthy lifestyle by walking the stairs. Posters and flyers telling us all to take the stairs were over flooding the school and many people, including us were a bit annoyed by that. Our project was meant to be an anti-campaign that would promote the use of elevators.
The idea was simple. We would place a motion sensor on the stairs that would be triggered every time someone would pass by telling them to take the elevator instead.
We wired an ultrasonic sensor to the breadboard and Arduino Uno and connected that to the computer. A PD-patch inside PureData Extended was created to play the recording when the sensor was passed.
We were excited to test it at the actual location. But as we were setting up on the stairs we soon figured out our installation needed way too much equipment and wires. We started tackling Raspberry Pi to make the whole thing more mobile. The only thing we then needed to add was the speaker and adjust our patch to run as soon as Pi is turned on.
Additionally we designed flyers and posters displaying different facts stating that the stairs are dangerous and bad for our health, and that people should be using the elevators more.
The reactions to our one-day installation were very mixed. Many people loved it, but it also pissed many people of. One of whom decided to tape over our speaker and eventually even opened the whole thing up and turned it off.
The team: Maja Tisel I Sara Mlakar
Mentor: Andy Farnell
Composing with Data Flow programming, Aalto University, Helsinki FI, September 2015