As one of the first mods freshies take in SUTD, 03.007 Design Thinking and Innovation introduces the design thinking process through a term-long design project to improve a location in the area surrounding campus. My group came across a small underpass between two office buildings, and developed a light installation concept within the underpass designed to foster social interaction.

Conceptualization

We started the design process by identifying our target audience within the site, and what effects our intervention was to have on our users. Our aims for the installation were to bring joy and stress relief to office workers commuting through the underpass, and passively foster socialization through micro interactions between pedestrians, while at the same time not obstruct pedestrians or provide too much of a distraction.

20 ideas were eventually narrowed down to one concept: an array of floating orbs of light that move up and down with the movement of the pedestrians underneath, inspired by the mass motion of Changi Airport’s Kinetic Rain. We then started fabricating two prototypes to demonstrate the concept: a functional model that showcases the interactivity of the installation, and a broader site model that shows the installation within the context of the site.

Prototyping

One of the main objectives of the installation was reactivity to the positions of multiple pedestrians in the underpass. When considering how this installation might be implemented in real life within an existing underpass, we concluded that lots of individual sensors underneath each ball wouldn’t be feasible; we landed on computer vision to detect the positions of pedestrians within the underpass, using a camera pointed in from the side of the walkway. To ease signalling, the orbs are lit with WS2812 RGB LEDs; a single LED is suspended in each orb, and the 25 LEDs are wired as a strip through a cable hanging from the top panel.

Our final prototype includes a control loop that actuates the 25 servos above the control panel, in order to generate the effect of an ‘arc’ of floating orbs following a scale-model pedestrian within the model. A camera feed pointed into the underpass model is passed through a script running YOLOv8, which draws bounding boxes around detected persons within the image. The coordinates of the bounding boxes are corrected into XY coordinates along the model floor, which are then used to determine the vertical positions of each orb. These positions are then sent to a pair of STM32 microcontrollers in the model itself, which then actuate each servo in the model.

This was my first experience with this sort of end-to-end design project, and while there definitely were some struggles along the way, it was very much a fulfilling experience. During the prototyping phase, I primarily focused on the hardware and electronics design of the functional prototype. While I’ve worked on electronics before, I’ve never worked on this scale, and we definitely ran into problems along the way. But after the many sleepless nights working to solve microcontroller limitations, quality control problems in our cheap hobby servos, and lots more potential disasters along the way, the satisfaction of seeing our design and ambitions come to life was also something I’ve never experienced before.

I’ve learned a lot from this project, not just about the design process or the technical details of designing and implementing electronics, but how to work as a team under pressure and through setbacks, which isn’t something most mods can teach.