Whispering Flowers
urban hacking project to provoke new ways of connecting with the city
STATUS : Past project
TYPE: Group Project
ROLE: Experience designer & prototyper
What if our urban environment was more aware and responsive to changes in the people who inhabit it? Whispering flowers was a temporary public installation that collected secrets from pedestrians and played those secrets anonymously.
Christine Kim, Hannah Steele, and I designed a series of robotic flowers that invite people to share their secrets.
As pedestrians come closer to the flowers, they can hear the recordings of people sharing their secrets.
The recordings are sent to the computer and stored in an iTunes library that plays the constantly updated list in the other flower speakers. We used Arduino and Makey Makey to build the electronics and Processing to program the system.
The "recording flower" plays "Hold me and tell me your secret". Once someone holds both sides of the flower, the recording is triggered.
As a fictional design installation, we explored what questions and discussions it could raise.
For example:
What kind of connections people would develop with their surroundings?
In what other ways could people connect with the city?
