Idea 1: A Childhood (Trick or) Treat

The fear to be the first penguin. The joy of going to the circus. A dynamic play of whimsical colors, irregular beats, and a captivating watch. Randy Pausch’s lighting show captures the nostalgia of childhood–a fleeting but incredibly important part of our lives. To make our bridge accessible to a casual audience, we’re interested in using colors and effects to capture wide-spread experiences, like jumping in a puddle on a rainy day, playing pretend late at night, or even trick-or-treating. Regardless of the memories we decide on, we want our lighting to reflect the playfulness and mischief that children feel entitled to and use to make their life that much brighter. Of all our ideas, this one is the least tech-heavy, as we wouldn’t be integrated any additional software or hardware, but rather takes advantage of the bridge’s ability to captivate its audience through storytelling and intentional, abstract lighting design.

Idea 2: Buggy Races from Carnival

One of our favorite memories from every school year is the Buggy races at carnival–a competition that all CMU students are excited to be, cheer at, and bet on as a thrilling and much-needed break from school. From the late night pushes to the rolls at the early break of dawn, commemorating each Carnival’s Buggy race on the Pausch Bridge would be the least we could do to thank our fellow students for bringing us so much joy. After determining the patterns and colors we associate with each buggy team, our group would then scrape data from the most recent Carnival Buggy race to determine the order in which groups would appear in our light show. 

Idea 3: Adding Tech to the Bridge

As a STEM-heavy group, we’re interested in exploring how we can combine additional technology into our lighting performance on the bridge. This goes to symbolize what the Pausch Bridge stands for: a union of science and art, data and creativity, and a reminder that we can all work together regardless of our major. As such, one idea we had was to webscrape the weather on campus from the last 24 hours and use that information to decide how our bridge is lit that night. The bridge would then become a reflection of the last 24 hours, and hopefully be both informative and enjoyable. 

However, we know that the first idea would require us to purchase sensors and find data that is outside the scope of this class. Another idea our team had was to integrate audio into our lighting decisions on the bridge. Using an intentional design that connects with our audience is a large priority we have, and we believe that lighting our bridge to the beat of a popular song can capture this and the interdisciplinary nature of CMU very well. No matter what genre of music is blasting through our headphones, we hope that our design will show that every student can march to their own beat. We are mindful that this project would require us to integrate a speaker system into the bridge and time our cues to follow the music exactly, but this is a risk we’re willing to take and excited to adapt to.