Design Process:

I. Research: Whilst brainstorming ideas, our group first decided to list out what were the themes that we wanted our project to tackle. We ended up with the following words, “provocation”, “public space”, “interactive and social” and “no phones”. As mentioned earlier we were inspired by Mouna Andraos’s Mesa Musical Shadows and Future Cities Lab’s Lightswarm interactive public art installations as well as the Forbes and Craig bust stop that has different art installations. We initially had an idea to have social bus stops in different cities that would react when someone in a different city pushes a button, however, after our first feedback session with the class, we realized it was too complicated and does not really have a clear objective. Brainstorming again, we came up with the Viral Bus Stop idea.

II. Proposal: Use IoT sensors to outfit multiple bus stops that would react to tweets from President Donald Trump’s twitter account. When the President tweets about foreign policy issues concerning other countries (we’ve focused on the most tweeted about currently: Mexico, Venezuela, China, Russia, and Syria), the first bus stop plays the most popular music from that country and lights up the country’s flag colors. If there are people in the bus stop at that moment that are reacting (moving, talking to each other), then that reaction activates the same music and light output in the closest bus stop. This enables the first bus stop to ‘see and hear’ the viral information spreading. This theoretically could continue for multiple bus stops.

III. Creating and Iterating:

A. Component Selection:

• PIR for movement detection
• Sparkfun sound detector for sound detection
• Neopixel Strips
• Argon
• Breadboards
• Speakers
• DF Player Mini (MP3 Storage)

B. Testing:

Step 1: Light Output Write code and wire circuit to ensure that the output works for each given input (5 countries = different flag colors on the Neopixel).

Step 2: Connectivity: Linked the output code with the input event being triggered by a contextual tweet through IFTTT. We could not use @realDonuldTrump’s real account as we needed more control over the input and so linked it to Lama’s twitter account @lamaalfulaij. We tested it multiple times and adjusted code to ensure that it would output different light patterns based on the tweet’s content.

Step 3: Sensors: Hook up PIR sensor and Sparkfun sound detector to trigger the next event at the next bus stop. We struggled with the sound detector as the music output as well as the general noise level of bus stops would be too difficult to calibrate. We decided to just stick to the PIR sensor.

Step 4: Music output: We really struggled with the music output. We initially planned to pull from Spotify’s top 50 most played song of each country’s but did not find a good way of doing so, so we turned to the DFPlayer Mini. After multiple tries and help from Dylan and Daragh, we still could not figure out why two different players were still not working.

Step 5: Putting it all together: Once we ensured each component was working separately, we drew out an ideal circuitry for both bus stops and assembled all the components together to ensure all the parts of the experience were working the right way. We then started to think about how this whole idea would come together in real life and be translated into a mockup of a street corner.

C. Code:

  See Execution I- Code for actual code. 

D. Circuitry: 

See Execution II- Circuitry for fritzing diagrams. 

E. Creating Form: As this is would be a large installation, we decided to create a mockup of the street corner where two of the bus stops would be located. We started by creating a foam core mock-up of the street and two bus stops to test how the assembly of the components would look like and to adjust our dimensions. We measured out how far each component needed to be so we could solder the right about of wiring.

See Form core mock up with assembled parts picture