Switching courses for the new semester,
this blog will now discuss my Interactive Exhibit Design course. This course is
the companion to the Digital History course last semester. The main goal of
this course is to produce an interactive multimedia exhibit using anything we
can think of. Our professor encourages us to think big and if it fails we still
get the marks for trying something completely new, rather then playing it safe.
This course will be going even farther out of my comfort zone then the previous
course, but three weeks in it already seems like it will be very interesting.
So far we’ve started learning the
programming language for Max 7, a program that was designed for use with midi
music programs. The program allows us to develop patches to link to buttons,
leds, counters, sliders and more we probably haven’t learned yet. These virtual
buttons etc. can be linked to physical partners, or sensors that can be used to
create interactive programs, games, or music among other things. Other programs
or elements were going to learn about before starting our projects include
sensors, desktop fabrication, MakeyMakey and a bunch of other things. The
second half of the course is devoted completely to working on our projects
ending with a demonstration day.
We had a brief brainstorming session in one
of our last classes discussing preliminary ideas for our projects, and getting
some feedback from our professor. For the base of my project I want to use a
map that was developed by Dr. John Snow, a doctor from the first half of the 19th
century, to track the outbreaks of cholera in London, England (I’ve mentioned
this map in one of my earlier posts.) This map helped prove the validity of
germ theory by linking the outbreak of cholera to a specific pump in Broad
Street. For the first step of my project, I’d like to transfer the map to
fabric and insert lights that can track the cases of the disease back to its
source with the push of a button. As a second step, our professor suggested a
way to make the map more interactive. I could include physical pumps connected
to sensors or some program that users could pull on, and the program would tell
them if the pump they were using was contaminated or not. I could also include
information on how patients would be treated, and the likelihood of survival.
This part would give users more of an understanding of how people lived in
different parts of the city during epidemics. The exhibit could end with a
description of any changes to Public Health policies as a result of the
epidemic. I’m not quite sure how I will accomplish this yet, but it will be
interesting to figure out how to make it work.
The connection between public health,
treatments of diseases and changing medical theories has interested me for a
long time, and I think it would be fun to try and translate this interest into
an exhibit format.
