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Designing Interactive Public Art Installations:
New Material Therefore New Challenges
Jun Hu, Mathias Funk, Yu Zhang, and Feng Wang
Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology
Den Dolech 2, 5612AZ Eindhoven, The Netherlands
j.hu@tue.nl
Abstract.
The new materials in public art installations give the birth to interac-
tivity and participation, which in turn, introduces new challenges, not only in
the creative design process, but also in how to involve the participants in this
process and in evaluating the targeted experience such as such as social connec-
tedness and inclusion. Six design cases are presented, as examples for interac-
tive and participatory forms of these installations. The design techniques and
the user experience evaluation methods overlap in these cases and many of
these techniques and methods have been found to be useful in our practice.
1
Introduction
Currently the cities are coming to life in the digital world. How this digital city be-
comes meaningful to us remains to be seen but the first signs point towards visual
solutions that augment the buildings, bridges, statues etc. The augmented layer can be
used as decoration, but also as public media where the social interactivity can take
pace [1]. One of the ways to approach these challenges is for example interactive
public installations. The current development in public art installations involves a
significant amount of new material and technology, resulting new dynamic, interac-
tive or participatory forms that require the artists and designers to construct their work
from a system view and with a good understanding of human-system interaction. It is
no longer about carving stones and casting bronze; it is time to sculpture the interac-
tive experience with the public participation [2, 3].
1.1
Five Generations of Materials
The term “public arts” often reminds people of the traditional art forms such as sculp-
tures, murals and installations in public spaces in cities. Even the bricks in the pave-
ments of a city square or the grass of the lawns in a park can used as the material by
the artists for these public arts. For artists, material is of vital importance in express-
ing their thoughts, motives and emotions [4]. Material is a language of art and it has
gone through several generations in the art history. From natural materials to recent
smart materials [5], there has been distinctively five generations: the first generation
of natural materials such as wood, bamboo, cotton, fur, leather and stones; the second
