Light Lab

An interactive installation for the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival

 

Quick Facts

  • Light Lab was an interactive installation created for the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival over the summer of 2017.

  • I pitched the idea to the Lotus organization in February of 2017 and led the team of four designers throughout the course of the project.

  • The installation was used by hundreds of festival attendees over the course of two nights during the festival.

  • Our process was based on exemplar collection, material exploration, and frequent stakeholder feedback to ensure a shared understanding for all involved.

Summary

The Lotus Festival project presented a unique opportunity to lead three other designers in a project from start to finish, ending with a fully functioning interactive installation used by hundreds of festival attendees.

In lieu of a more traditional summer internship during the summer of 2017, I approached the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival with the idea of leading my own project and building an interactive installation to be exhibited as one of the festival’s attractions.

This was a completely new experience for me and a big risk for many reasons. In the end, the installation was very well received by festival attendees, and the Lotus organization was absolutely thrilled with our work and end result.

 

 

Final installation

Filmed and edited by the talented Jim Walsh. A special shout out to the baby at 1:15 who decides she will be taking that disc now.

Light Lab Created by: Shelby Stephens Cameron Davis Jim Walsh Patrica Zdziarska Music by Ethan Helfrich lotusfest.org

 

 Communicating Themes

To start the process of design the installation, we began collecting hundreds of exemplars of anything to do with shared interactivity in a public space. These could include other interactive installations, public transport, urban design, and anything else that inspired our thinking.

We condensed these down into five themes and shared our thoughts with the Lotus organization early on before starting any prototyping.

 Material Prototyping

We tried out many different ideas during the early stage of the project, but one of our more promising ones was to hand out resin light filters to festival attendees that would splash light on buildings and surfaces around the festival when put in front of a phone LED bulb.

Unfortunately, the Lotus organization had some legitimate concerns that these could be distracting to performers if used excessively, so we moved on to other ideas. However, this is a good example of the material prototyping we did with many of our ideas during the project.

Molding different versions of the resin light filters to be used for testing.

Testing and logging the epoxy resin light filters as part of our initial concepting.

Prototype device that would allow people to hold the resin light filters over their phone’s LED bulb.

3D modeled concept of the prototype being used. 3D model created by Jim Walsh.