mold.
a petri dish playground through which tactile-handled interactions generate visuals of mold on a projected tabletop interface. group project created for exhibition at imagine rit 2024.
final design.
For the final design, we ended up settling on visuals that were created by me as they looked and behaved the most like mold in real life. using my touch designer file, the developers on the team were able to pipe in object detection that they coded in python which detects the objects on the table and triggers the visuals I created, mimicking mold slowly spreading and growing.
project reel.
project goals.
attract visitors
Draw people in and bring them into our exhibit from the main imagine rit event.
wow audience
make the users go wow! we want anyone who interacts with mold to get excited!
generative visuals
use generative visuals in order to create an interactive experience.
memorable experience
create an experience that is remembered far beyond the exhibit.
research phase
the research phase was spent brainstorming the types of mold we wanted to display, how we wanted to display them, and how the user would interact with the visuals. We spent a lot of time researching how mold behaves in real life in order to make our visuals accurate. We also wanted to make sure the project was accessible and intriguing for kids.
brainstorming & Sketches
we spent a lot of time looking at different types of mold and fungi and studying their behaviors and growth patterns in order to decide what type of mold we wanted to display. eventually We broke down all the types of mold we researched into 3 categories: noodley, even spread, and smooth.
design inspiration
We found that making the mold look too realistic decreased the likelihood that users would interact with the petri dish. instead, we pivoted to making the mold eye-catching and colorful in order to catch peoples attention. our font choice was largely based on keeping the design fun and innocent as it was mostly geared towards kids.
design iterations
only iterations created by me will be shown below although other designers on the team created their own visual interpretations of mold.
iteration 1
For my first design iteration, I created touch designer visuals that mimicked the behavior of slime mold, a mold known for its "intelligEnce" and ability to spread along the path of least resistance. However, we didn't end up using this iteration as unless you knew what slime mold was it was not obvious enough to an initial user that what they were looking at was mold.
iteration 2
For my second design iteration, i pivoted away from slime mold and tried to create something that mimicked a smooth spreading mold. This created really cool visuals, however the visuals did not look enough like real mold.
project takeaways
the biggest takeaway for me was learning how to work on a team of both designers and developers. most of my projects up to this point were created solo or with the help of other designers, so it was interesting to experience communicating with the developers and working together to create something that none of us could do on our own.
