With Aaron Parker, Estelle Leishman
Week 8 - April 28th
For the last assignment for Experimental Interfaces and Tangible Interaction Design (DESN3600), I have teamed up with Estelle Leishman and Aaron Parker. We all enthusiastically agreed to create an articulated dragon puppet! The idea was inspired by Estelle’s fascination with Curious Legends, a theatre company that creates wonder with uniquely designed puppets, and Healthy Harold, Estelle explained to me that this giraffe puppet just tells kids not to do drugs and eat healthy food – hilarious! I support the idea of using dragons as our subject because I would remember when I was a kid, I had a children’s book about raising a mythical creature. I would then have a clear book filled with my drawings copied from the children’s book because of how obsessed I was with dragons, unicorns, and Pegasus.
We used Slack as our main communications platform and Zoom meeting for video calls. And as for my role in the group, I see myself as the technical artist, acting as a link between artists and programmers or a hybrid of artist and programmer. I am not saying I am the best in both, but I do understand how creativity and technology can be bridged together or also can be known as creative technologies. And for my tasks, I would help out in visual development, circuit mapping, circuit assembly, and producing the dragon egg.
We would be sharing moodboards, concepts, and videos of how our dragon would look and how can it interact. I helped in creating visual concepts of the dragon egg and the dragon, stylistic moodboards, and possible experimental interactions. We decided that it will be an arms-length size, an on-the-ground puppet that will be pulled with a magnet hook, interactions may include (a) nose, bop it with sound effects, (b) back soft spine that has flexible LEDs with relaxing patterns, (c) motion detection which shall dynamically change the LEDs patterns, (d) Tail touch sensor for angry growling sounds and hyper patterns of LEDs, and lastly would be an (e) Sight sensor that can detect objects close to its face.