FRIENDS
2020
Interaction Design
A concept for an interactive, p5j based installation, prompted by a Persian tapestry-esque fabric bookmark given to me by one of my best friends. By answering a series of questions about a friend, a tile would be generated and then displayed amongst other people’s tiles, creating one giant mosaic of ‘friends’.
As a starting point for this project, I dissected what this object meant to me. The bookmark was given to me by my friend at a time of us growing closer and building memories together, almost akin to patterns building up a tapestry or mosaic. As such, I begun to sketch out ideas according to these concepts of building, creation and growth.
I physically workshopped a concept born from the combined ideas of pattern generation and a display of built up patterns, to get a sense of interaction between the audience and the concept. This concept placed an emphasis on customisation as a response to the idea of a ‘growing friendship’, with the interaction honing onto the person taking time and care to build their little tile. A problem defined from this exercise was the lack of direct, sentimental connection between the interaction and my choice of theme, with its unlimited freedom and additional lack of concrete narrative.
To build a solid narrative with the interaction, I took inspiration from personality quizzes and re-configured the customisation process as a series of questions, that would create a tile that would represent a friend. Each answer would correlate to a colour and shape. A limitation implemented was that each question would have options that one could choose from, so figuring out the creative coding process of customisation make up would be easier and more effective.
On p5j, I experimented with shapes and colours, before starting to work with opacity, to allow for the tiles to emulate texture and visual intrigue.
