The pandemic has affected all of us. Lives have been lost, disrupted, and changed forever. And Covid has proven resilient... it may never go away. Our relationships to public spaces and human interaction — are forever changed.
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How do we renegotiate relating to and reconnecting with people as we begin to reinhabit spaces together?

During the first Covid lockdown, people used creativity and imagination to reimagine interaction from their balconies and windows, resulting in touching moments of spontaneous singing, music, and a communal sense of togetherness.

As the world comes out of the pandemic, we wanted to preserve and remember those moments of shared joy by recreating this form factor. By creating music together, we can express ourselves in way unbounded by distance or the stress of current events.
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Users can interact with our design by stepping through a doorway, onto a balcony. When they are standing on the platform, the vocal track of the song plays. If another person steps on the balcony across from the first balcony, the instrumental track plays. This makes the song complete.

Together, they can experiment with playing pieces of the tracks, or add their own sound effects to the track through other pressure pad buttons on the balcony.

If you want a quick overview of the process we took to get to this point, just have a look at the video below.

This was a project for Prototyping studio, where we ended up learning - you guessed it! A lot of prototyping. This involved lots of ideation, downselecting and testing (I’m not even counting the hours spend in debugging 😭)

If you’re interested, the entire thing has been documented here in detail - along with all the code we used to make this.