The UX of Birdsong (Week 2)
Brief: Design an urban birdsong experience.
Research Methods: Digital sound walking and physical prototyping
Team: Jakob Prufer, Carlotta Montanari, Lingjia Fang, Roshni Suri
We agreed we would research several topics we found interesting associated with birdsong, to give us a stronger narrative. We then discussed what we had learned as a group and debated the strength of the ideas and experiences we could create from this.
Reviewing the research together. Photo credit: Jakob Prufer
The most interesting research pieces were around light pollution, and the consequence of artificial night lighting causing birds to sing at contrasting times to their natural rhythm. (Da Silva et al., 2014, Da Silva et al., 2015), as we had all experienced this without considering the reasons behind it.
We decided to create an experience around this, for awareness and engagement with the topic, by authentically building a bird's nest as the basis of the design.
Collecting materials for the nest. Photo credits: Lingjia Fang
We collected leaves, twigs, dried grass, and began the basic structure of the nest, however realised that our first attempt was using too many leaves and was becoming overcomplicated, so we simplified back to just using twigs for the nest.
Development of the nest and the integration of the technology. Photo credits for all: Jakob Prufer
As the nest began to take shape, we weaved dried grasses in to fill in the nest shape. Meanwhile, we visited the CTL Lab to begin our digital element of the piece: to create sound influenced by light. The Arduino board held a light sensor placed at the bottom of the nest, concealed by leaves. We tested the integration of this throughout the build.
Testing prior to presentation. Video credits: Carlotta Montanari
Once complete, we held a number of tests with members from our cohort, who gave us feedback to incorporate into the final experience.
Final prototype. Photo credits: Roshni Suri, Jakob Prufer
The final result was a beautiful nest which when subjected to light, birdsong would play. The sounds played were relational to the amount of light; as more light birds are exposed to, the louder and sharper their sounds become.
The feedback we received was:
Sounds could have been manipulated more to express more pain the brighter it got
Which birds are affected? Are there different nests/experiences for different birds, or different intensities of light for different birds?
Designing the spectator experience - consider staging with/out laptop and cables etc
Consider transition between demonstration and presentation - could have worked backwards from design point to research justification
The feedback was fair; we had started again, so more development into the presentation and specific scenarios would have been possible with more time to expand this.
I am proud of myself and the team; we worked well together to research and debate the design ideas. There was a moment during this week where we were all a little defeatist, and not positive about our ideas, however we worked through this to produce a simple and creative experience that we felt passionate about and had an emotional connection to.
Da Silva, A., Valcu, M. and Kempenaers, B. (2015) “Light pollution alters the phenology of dawn and dusk singing in common European songbirds,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370(1667), p. 20140126. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0126.
Da Silva, A. et al. (2014) “Artificial night lighting rather than traffic noise affects the daily timing of dawn and dusk singing in common European songbirds,” Behavioral Ecology, 25(5), pp. 1037–1047. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/aru103.
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