Melody Her
THE BUSCADE
Transforming solitary waiting at bus stops into a collaborative and engaging experience through gameplay and ambient light.
Duration - 2 weeks | Fall 2019
My Role - Developer
Team - Ria Jethmalani, Melody Her, Pornkamol Prapapornvorakul, Xiaoyi Zhu
Intention
The primary goal of our project is to create an environment that encourages interactions among strangers.
One such space we identified is the bus stop. It is a place we visit multiple times every day. It can be very frustrating as it feels like most of our time is spent waiting for the bus. While doing so, we encounter the same people almost every day, yet we do not interact with them or even acknowledge their presence. Instead, we occupy ourselves with our phones to avoid eye contact or any type of interaction.
Community
"Familiar strangers are people that we regularly observe but never interact with." - Stanley Milgram
Unlike people that we know and the others who are complete strangers we encounter once and never see again, familiar strangers are somewhere in between. Familiar strangers, since we encounter them regularly in familiar settings, establish our connection to individual places. The relationship we have with them is real wherein both parties mutually agree to ignore each other without any implications of hostility.
Through our project, we aim to explore how might we break this pattern of ignorance to create a positive experience by facilitating interactions in a non-intrusive way.
Process
Playing games was central to our idea since it facilitates interaction. While gaming can be competitive, we focused on collaboration as the primary interaction. We looked at ways in which people could light up bus stops for safety with combined efforts, considered having different bus stops interactions across city to reflect the character of the area and promote exploration, and dug into opportunities between pairing opposite stops.
In all these instances, we landed on our final concept that facilitates interactions in an intuitive, engaging and simplified manner.
Conceptual Design
Our system is installed at the bus stop, it comprises of an enchanted bus stop sign and multiple tiles embedded into the floor around the stand.
The sign is wrapped with LED lights to create an ambient effect. In its resting state, it glows white with two dots, one blue and one orange, running through it.
The tiles have footprints on them, guiding users to stand on it. Once the user steps on it, the panel will glow either blue or orange, indicating the user’s team color.
The user then starts to move from foot to foot as a natural behavior. This prompts two changes to take place simultaneously. Firstly, the panel on the tile will start blinking based on the movement. This encourages the user to keep moving to discover what is happening. Secondly, the bus stop sign shows the points for each team in the form of LED lights glowing in the team's color. Having the team color on the tile seamlessly allows the user to make the connection between the color on the tile and sign.
When either team wins, the entire bus stop sign displays the winning team's color in a running pattern.
Storyboard
The storyboard below shows the contexts and how community members interact with The BusCade.
Prototype
Iterated rapid prototyping and user testing process
Outcome
Users having fun and enjoying interacting with the prototypes