Microcosmic Meadow

Jessica Lew and Jen Kwang

Narrative Description

The Microcosmic meadow aims to create delight and wonder in visitors by allowing them to create an effect in a much larger environment by manipulating a much smaller one. Visitors can touch, bend, and talk to a single flower in a pot that came from the meadow in order to move elements in the larger environment.

Ideally, visitors wandering by would want to play with the potted plant and begin moving or touching it. Then, upon noticing how the larger meadow in the background is changing, they would experiment and try to find new behaviors in the meadow. The main hallmark of success is whether children realize that the way that they interact with the potted plant causes a reaction in the meadow.  The preferred installation location for this exhibit would be in the Buhl Hallway.

Technical Outline

Users will interact with a smaller, single flower in a pot that will then allow the components in the larger environment to move.  Behaviors mapped out so far for this project include:

• Talking to/blowing on potted plant will cause all elements of the environment to sway (windmill, clouds, and plants)
• Bending the potted plant will cause the plants in the environment to bend in similar direction
• Covering the potted plant in user’s shadow will cause environment to shift to a night

Overall the physical actions can be created with use of DC motors and hobby servos to “pull” an array of objects in a certain direction (please refer to sketches section for more detail).  Additionally, because of the small size, it will be possible to use the motor itself as the axis of rotation for the spinning windmill. The sun will require lights with translucent material to allow lighting to be transmitted through for transition of day and night.  The installation may require other sources of light, should the sun not be bright enough.

The materials needed for this project include fake flowers, cotton balls (for the cloud), laser cut plywood (for the internal pieces and the container), clear acrylic to create a window barrier for the box, DC motors (for the windmill/cloud), and hobby servos (for the movement of flowers), fishing line/cord, and lighting. For the potted plant, additional sensors are necessary including including a flex sensor, photoresistors, and a microphone (or any sound sensor).

Since part of the objective of the project is to get visitors to experiment with the potted plant, one of the main key technical challenges will be making the plant durable enough to withstand interacting with it in ways that are unexpected.  Being able to construct all of the individual components together in the larger environment will also prove to be challenging, but it is always possible to scale back the original plans by removing certain elements or creating fewer duplicates of each element.

Project Management and Budget

For the first on-site test, we aim to have a functional potted plant and meadow; however, the meadow only needs to contain one flower to start with. The potted plant also does not need to have all of its features finished. The main feature that should be completed by the first test is the flower’s ability to bend and measure the angle of bending. Then, after the first test, we can better determine how robust the project needs to be and make adjustments accordingly.

Over the course of creating this exhibit, we will attempt to create all components as detailed in the technical outline and sketches.  However, because there are so many pieces required for the project to be “complete,” (such that time may be an issue) we will choose to focus on implementing the following list of components, in descending order of importance.  Higher numbered items may be less likely to appear in the final project.

1. Potted plant with flex sensor and photoresistor
2. Environment flowers with capability of movement (several arrays mounted onto base)
3. Environment’s outer container
4. Windmill with moving blades
5. Cloud and sun construction
6. Lighting behind sun
7. Cloud mechanism (coupled with “wind” detection with microphone in potted plant)
8. Set dressing (backdrop of environment)
9. Making potted plant wireless (may not be necessary for final installation)

The budget and timeline can be found here

Sketches (click to enlarge)