Your Carbon Footprint in action

So after developing the prototypes we built the actually unit that would be placed in a public space. The unit has four steps, each one related to the pollution levels of a certain country. We built the unit from plywood and sprayed it black and spray the countries' names in a bright orange.

The theory behind the unit is quite simple. Once a member of the audience steps on a plate a frequency is triggered that relates to the pollution of the country they are stepping on. So for example, France's level of pollution was 5.61, meaning it was played back to the audience at 561HZ.

Prior to the week we put the unit into a public space we went to the same space (The Nexus, CIT) and presented the data in a text form and asked the people who took part to answer questions based on a licket scale. A week later we put the unit in and asked the same questions to test against the results we had already gathered. We wanted to see if having people interacte with a musical device that changes the modality of information from text to auditory would help raise people's awareness and concern levels whilst having fun at the same time. We were pretty impressed with the results! Check out the video beneath.

Data for Chosen Countries

Survey Draft 2

Carbon Footprint Survey 2 by

Survey Draft 1

This survey will be used to gauge the knowledge that people have with regards to CO2 emissions before they use our product.

Carbon Footprint – Survey by

CO2 emissions per capita

We have been looking at public worldwide data about CO2 emissions online. This graph shown above is information provided by the world bank and graphically illustrated by google which is free to use. This online tool is useful for the project because it allows us to research the amount of CO2 emissions in any country and compare them to other countries. We can use this data to input into our carbon footprint structure which will give audio feedback to the audience in relation to the data shown above. Data like this will also be used throughout the testing stage to gain an understanding of the public's knowledge about worldwide CO2 emissions.

google.com/publicdata

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/

Arduino Cardboard Prototype

This is our first prototype for "Your Carbon Footprint". We build it using two beer mats with tinfoil attached to the end of each. Wires are then connected from the tinfoil into a breaker board that is connected to an Arduino board. We designed this prototype as a test to make sure everything was working. We are now going to start to build the actually steps that will be used in our project.

Your Carbon Footprint - Idea

Your Carbon Footprint

Mark Fitzsimons & Sam Miles -  Avant Garde MM4

The aim of this project is to inform the audience about urban pollution in Europe in a fun, different way by creating an interactive spectacle that the public will be intrigued to use.

We plan on using a sequence of steps in which the audience will interact with. Each individual step represents a european city. These steps use a pressure sensor which triggers auditory, visual and haptic feedback to the audience.

The sensors are designed to pay homage to the iconic billie jean video by Michael Jackson where the ground lights up after every step that Michael takes.

The data that is being presented through the three mediums (sound, vision and touch) are a live representation of the urban pollution readings in a city at that given time. The higher the intensity of the feedback the higher the levels of carbon pollution. (I.e higher vibration, lights up red)

Audiotory feedback – Each step will contain a note sound once pressed that will play once part of the Billie Jean sequence.

Visual feedback – Each step contains LEDs which represent different levels of air pollution, Green being low, Yellow being mid range and Red being high.

Haptic feedback – Each Step will vibrate once stepped on in different levels to show air pollution in a physical way. The more intense the vibrates the higher the level of air pollution.

Inspiration (Hommage to):           

Michael Jackson – Billie Jean video

Multisensor Broadband High Dynamic Range Sensing... for a Highly Expressive    
Step-based Musical Instrument – Steve Mann

Red Balloon, Green Balloon, Sensors in the Sky – Stacey Kuznetsov

In Touch with Space: Embodying Live Data For Tangible Interaction.. Trevor Hogan