Build Your Own Cityscape

That was definitely a somewhat unexpected and very amusing experience,
and it was very interesting to see the contrast between the morning and afternoon groups.

While the kids in the morning were very enthusiastic, I feel like they didn't pay that much attention to the shadows  in their interaction with my piece, and were occasionally more involved in throwing/stacking/playing dominoes with the buildings. It was great to see them have fun, but I feel like I could probably make some changes to the prototype to enable a slightly more restrained experience, such as reshaping the buildings to make them less homogenous and stackable.  Also, it was interesting to see that almost none of them read the whiteboard descriptions, and collectively they actually managed to accidentally wipe the whole slate clean.

Photo from John's camera

On the other hand, for the families that came in the afternoon, most were moving at a less chaotic pace, and actually had time to play with the "shadows" instead of the buildings. Most of them would fiddle around with the buildings a bit, then read the whiteboard, and then try to observe the pinhole effect.

(On that note, I remember hearing someone say at dinner that "people aren't as smart as you'd expect"; there were quite a few people who left after failing to see the effect, because when they moved a building closer to the light, there were still multiple buildings blocking out all the light in the front. Next time, the instructions should probably be a bit more explicit.)

I also noticed at least 3 separate groups that sat down, and had parents explaining the color separation effect to their children. A completely unintended but nice result of having the sofa instead of a stool, was that I think the parents were slightly less impatient...

But one thing I noticed was that more often than not the parents would actually hurry the children along, and force them to leave in the midst of exploration. This was somewhat surprising and not entirely pleasant to watch.

The biggest challenge I had in developing was probably the light source, or more generally the direction I should take with the light and shadows component. I tried fairly hard to achieve an actual reversed image pinhole effect (I really wanted to be able to have the windows "change shape") but in the end as John pointed out I couldn't have both that and the element of scaling. Later on there were a few other light sources that proved to be less-than-ideal, and a mishap that involved me buying a set of light bulbs with a weird incompatible socket..

I'm partly satisfied with the light source I have now, but it's still somewhat of a compromise, because the colors while on one hand contribute to the pinhole effect, also contribute to distractiveness and blurriness. I think I will have to try a few more light sources before friday.

Another thing that Alex pointed out when we were observing the morning session kids was that it'd be cool to have landmarks or iconic buildings dispersed through the regular shaped buildings. While originally I was hesitant about making different shapes because they'd take away from the rescaling factor, after hearing conversations of kids where they'd exclaim "This is New York!" "No, it's San Francisco!", I think that would be something they'd enjoy. I could probably still preserve the rescaling factor by making the shapes incorrectly scaled, and this would also hopefully prevent the games of domino. So this is something I'd be working on this week.