Cool Cities

Recently accepted and published as a Demo Paper For the  
16th Interaction Design and Children Conference

Role: team member

Course: Educ 211/236 - BEYOND BITS AND ATOMS

overview

A tangible user interface to empower young leaders to think critically about climate change. Here is the abstract for our project:

Understanding the relationship between human behavior and environmental impact is both important and challenging for learners. Elements like energy efficiency involve financial tradeoffs that are essential to understanding the complexity of both global climate change and social constraints.  The collective decisions stakeholders make as consumers directly influences environmental health. Learning experiences that allow children ages seven to nine to actively consider and negotiate the value of these elements will help them understand the complex tradeoffs involved in making these decisions. To address this challenge, we propose Cool Cities: a tangible user interface (TUI) game in which young children aged 7-9 design environmentally friendly cities around different social constraints and within a given budget. Learners work together to choose different elements of a city, such as trees, buildings, and vehicles and negotiate a design based on various prompts, such as providing for an influx of tourists or families. The financial and environmental impact of each element placed on the TUI is reflected through a responsive visual display through which learners can evaluate their choices in real-time. Cool Cities empowers peers to take on the role of either a mayor or an environmental engineer. In their respective roles, each player has a different priority, such as to stay under budget or to build the most energy efficient city. Players negotiate and work together to choose elements and optimize their design with each prompt. We hope that by designing constructionist learning experiences in which learners practice the complex modeling, critical thinking, and decision making needed for large scale urban planning projects, they can better relate science to their lived experiences and discover big ideas for improving the world we live in.

materials/programs: processing language, tangible user interface, reactivision, laser cut wood materials

demo video

interface visual feedback

Top Left Image: Starting screen. Physical elements manipulated on blue space.
Top Right Image: Dynamic bar graph on right side of screen, comparing budget and carbon emission level, changes based on associated values from physical elements placed.
Bottom Left Image: Temporal images display below each physical element when placed for additional visual feedback about the type of element placed (i.e. extremely high carbon emission displays smoke image).
Bottom Right Image: Final screen. Displays confetti and a panel of information that 1) connects the designed city to an existing U.S. city with a similar level of carbon, 2) explains the impact of carbon emission on climate change, and 3) suggests ways children can be environmentally efficient in real life.

iteration of wooden elements

Left to Right: Version 1 to Version 2, Laser cut engraved wooden icons with labels and fiducials attached to botom

prototype 1

Testing first functional version of Cool Cities. Use of Processing programming language and cardboard fiducials.