APD Week 8 - Play and Audience

MAGI Door

Theme:

Play and Audience

Context:

I was inspired by interactive games that involve people as spectators of the game:

'Hit Me!' by Kaho Abe

http://kahoabe.net/portfolio/hit-me/

Urban Codemakers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK14RZCPPuo

And Helen Kwok's work inspired me to branch out and try using the Makey Makey to make one of my own works.

Steal the Treasure! – Helen Kwok

http://magistudio.net/work/steal-the-treasure-week-3-theme-play-tinkering

I was also inspired by the idea by Huizinga that "Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life". So I thought, why not take the ordinary act of walking through a door and make it magical?

The added element of focusing on the audience of this work is the comraderie it inspires in participants, not dissimilar to my work in Week 3 APD Tinkering:

"A work could specifically require or encourage people to inter-act with each other or it might merely establish an environment that permits social interaction" - pg. 81 A Study in Play, Pleasure and Interaction Design by Brigid Costello and Ernest Edmonds, 2007.

Method:

Make it so when a door is opened, it ‘magically’ triggers a sound - the people/audience inside the room react (they are in on the prank). The unsuspecting door opener is delighted and/or surprised.

I used the Makey Makeyto create a circuit. This gets broken when the door is opened, which then triggers the play button on Quicktime Player, which plays a sound.

I tried a range of sounds before settling on the ‘Game Award’ / ‘Power Up’ / game-theme-inspired sound (from Envato Elements). 

The first sound I tried was of a Cockatoo saying ‘hello’, but in the context of the space it sounded like a creaky door. I also tried a lion’s roar, which was a bit too scary.

Response:

Here is video documentation of the ‘MAGI Door’!

When the door is opened by an unsuspecting person, a sound plays and surprises them, while others look on with glee.