flourish
An interactive installation in public space

Concept

In the past years, large-format displays found their way into public and semi-public spaces. Even in times of the mobile web and geolocalization, public displays are mostly used for commercial advertising. In contrast, flourish is a design concept for a future application scenario on an interactive public display that faces the lack of visually appealing and non-interactive applications.

"My child is always excited when there is some kind of movement at a public display. When there was only something interesting or nice-to-see instead of these ads…" - Linda, 35

Field research at the highly frequented metro station Friedrichstrasse in Berlin came to the conclusion that, surprisingly, people would just like to see something beautiful on public displays instead of the annoying ads.

As a result, the interactive installation flourish tries to enable the interaction of a public display with a smartphone of a bypassing pedestrian and tries to catch the attention by presenting something simple, well-known and beautiful: a meadow full of flowers.
flourish reacts on the movement of a bypassing pedestrian and shows only the crowd sourced flowers while somebody is standing in front of the display. Hence, people should be motivated to linger in front of the display and slow-down instead of running aggressively through the connecting passage of a metro station. The pedestrian can either submit an own flower with his/her smartphone through the custom designed app or interact with the flowers by moving in front of the display. The application can be accessed by scanning a QR-Code (see further down) and custom flowers can only be submitted in a range of 10 meters from the display.

The project has been developed with HTML5 and the support of the JavaScript 3D library three.js as well as Microsoft Kinect in the context of the course "Public Displays - Und jetzt?" at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam under the supervision of Monika Hoinkis.

Process

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Team

Roland Heuger, Sebastian Sadowski und Florian Schulz are Berlin / New York based freelance Interaction Designers and Interfacedesign Students at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany.

Credits

High resolution picture can be downloaded here.
Thanks for the support to Monika Hoinkis from FHP, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. Further information about the research topic at http://interface.fh-potsdam.de/publicdisplays