Brief:
With Doku:Tech approaching us for the second time, the task was no less intricate.
This time, the client came with a basic concept "Fear, Hope and Everything in Between" which would parallel the human relation to technology advancements. As we make the initial contact with new technology we fear it (as it happened with the train on the first movie), then we learn to like it while seeing hope from what can come out of it, and everything in between is what we live with throughout the existence of said technology.
But how were we as a design team to evoke fear and hope when it feels like it's all been seen and done in regards to reachable technology that we had for this project?
So we decided to trust these instincts to more instinctual creatures. We decided to step back from design ourselves and let other creatures do it for us. We decided to do a bit of an experiment with animals.
As with all experiments on animals, we had to make sure that what we are doing is ethical.
This way we built an interactive platform with arduinos and rasbpberry pi on which we would put food for pigeons and other birds in the park, at a place they'd been used to being fed, and also added food around it, so that we wouldn't interfere with their daily diet.
The platform would play cat mews everytime a bird would step on it to get food. Thus, the hope would be the food, the fear: the cat, and the birds' behaviur against it , would be everything in between.
We added cameras all around: a 360 in the middle, two on the sides to track the movements.
These movements would then generate the figures of birds on our canvas.
Surprisingly for us, the cat sounds attracted a dog nearby as well, so the cat, the dog and the bird ended up to become our main characters.
- making of
360° Video
- Print
The layout of the posters would be divided in two frames:
1. The information of the event
2. The outcome image from the experiment
In regards to colors we found that actual fear and hope are the two extremes we rarely or never meet, thus it's only the "everything in between" that we get to live with. So we used the color spectrum and the greyscale gradient as backgrounds. However, we cropped the extremes on them, thus minusing from the gradients the pure blacks and whites and the ends of the color spectrum.
To add more to the reality, we wanted to show the blunt reality of the way we use technology today. So for the layout we used excel, as one would normally use in research; we used word art for social media gifs; photocopy gradients in the middle of the pages and most of other visual elements that everyday users use, rather than perfection-searching designers.
- social media campaign
- doku.tech event
Finally we were invited to do a talk and explain our process to the event audience as well, being so the only local speakers in the conference.
