Elvelangs 2023

University project – 2 weeks, group project – 2023

Brief: Design an interactive experience at Elvelangs 2023

Elvelangs is a cultural event for the whole family along the river Akerselva in Oslo. The public is invited to an atmospheric walk along the river to experience different installations from professionals and amateurs.

We were a team of 4 students tasked with creating an interactive installation as part of my interaction design master’s degree. This was a short project in the first few weeks of the course, so the emphasis of this project was to explore creative coding to create something that would pique the interest of the passerbyes. We worked with BBC micro:bits and coded in p5.js to create an experience where the physical shaking of bags lit by LEDs resulted in colourful explosions projected onto nearby trees.

It was a great learning experience in many different ways. We got to experience how different something looks on a laptop screen compared to a projection on an organic object and how the code had to be modified. There was also learning in seeing how people would interact with our installation. It was pouring rain on the day of the event, so we had to adapt to find a new location to protect the projectors and our laptops running the code from the rain. For me, the most important learning experience was the constant problem-solving needed when problems inevitably arise during a project like this.