My school hosted 2 HCI lab weeks where my group designed and developed an interactive cultural dinner experience. We displayed 3 different types of cuisines (🇸🇪🇳🇱🇬🇷) with music, facts about the dishes, translated expressions, objects with sound effects and a payment terminal with a surprising mint drop at the end. All the visuals were created by me with JavaScript and Figma. Whilst the physical objects and hand tracking was made by my teammates with Arduino and P5.js.
Project made by Alice Stewart, Jelle van Kleef, Channah Noah, Nikolaos Sardelis and Ilya Klaassen
1. Empathise:
Working with the theme “playful interactions” we aimed to find everyday-tasks that should be made more fun. With a mix of desk research and group discussions we found some common ground that was layed out on a paper sheet.
2. Define:
When defining we werent totally decided on the theme, but more so about the technology. We wanted to implement and explore the possibilities of hand-tracking from p5.js, projection and arduino.
3. Ideate:
For ideation we continued scribbling on our paper sheet and for each theme or task we combind brainstorming with visual mindmapping.
4. Prototype:
Because of the time crunch we had to prototype very efficiently, which we used Figma and Wizard of OZ to complete. We tested projection on different surfaces and easily dragged around visuals on figma to check out where they should be placed.
5. Test:
Throughout the process we tested on each other, teachers and classmates, but the real test ended up being on the exhibition when all types of visitors were trying it out. We received a bunch of positive feedback, whilst also witnessing how people were interacting with the installation that gave insights on how to potentially improve in the future
Our exhibit is an interactive cultural dinner, where the users can explore 3 different cuisines/cultures. The chosen nations are Netherlands, Greece and Sweden which represents the nationalities of the group members. To achieve the feeling of each culture we created a neutral “canvas” with a white tablecloth, cutlery, plates, glasses, a lampshade and some plant garlands. This gave the real restaurant feeling, but not any specific cuisine before the projection changes.