03 Jul 2009 FRI - Experiments no.2 & 3 inside Museum Building

We met in the morning to plan next steps. We decided that each of us would start to think about the design spec, as it must be defined on July 1oth. We also discussed the idea of forming a loose art collective inspired on the Etoy collective (www.etoy.com). We think it is necessary to create a buzz about our project and that a bit of branding might help. Dara developed a few ideas around the name and logo. We will discuss it further next week.

Around lunchtime we went to the Museum Building to continue our experiments. On the way, we stopped at the Science Gallery to enquire about their RFID tracking system for the Infectious exhibition. We were told to contact the Exhibitions Officer (Don). Marcos emailed him and he replied so we should hopefully meet him next week.

We continued Experiment No. 1 and conducted Experiments No.2 & 3. Killian and Binbin worked on Experiment No.1 followed a few more people coming out of the Museum Building so that we could get some more data. Initial impressions indicate that most people leaving building go towards the main entrance and the Arts block.

Marcos conducted Experiment No.2: interviewing tourists entering the building. Asking them how they found out about it, if they felt intimidated entering the building and going up staircase in the main hall and what were there feelings about the building. He also plotted their circulation patterns. Initial impressions indicate some tourists found it through their guidebooks and the others just stumbled across it by curiosity once they saw people exiting the main door. Most were intimidated by the main door and the absence of any signs, plus the sign indicating that main staircase was off limits for visitors (a few tourists ventured past it after a bit of hesitation). Many were impressed by the architecture. The only teenage visitors said it reminded them of "Harry Potter". One Czech female tourist liked it so much she came back 15 minutes later with a few of her friends.

Dara conducted Experiment No.3: taking several pictures of textures and patterns under different lighting inside the building and assemble them in strips in a Photoshop composition.

We have gathered a lot of data so far, so we will be analysing it during the next week. We shortlisted equipment needed for our Experiments on Sunday. This is planned to be a big session with several experiment in light, sound and motion. Below is the map were we plotted trajectories of Experiment No.1. It gave us some insight in how the final design spec might look like.

Marcos.