Marie Sester – Little Box
Little Box is an interactive installation that is concepted by Marie Sester. Little Box senses the environment around it by using it’s sensors and response back to it with lights, sound and movement. I worked with 2 other creative technologists and artists (Emily Webster & Genevieve Hoffman) on this installation. We took the concept from sketches and designed & developed a this piece with interactive elements to bring it to life. Here is a few notes from our process:
*The tray is an important element to the box. It needs to be elevated and flush with the top of the box and also allow the actuators to pass through, lifting the lid. To bring the tray up making it flush with the box we cut clear, square acrylic rod to the height of the box less the material thickness of the Corian. We placed the risers in each corner as supports and the tray rests neatly on them and flush with the exterior box. *Although the LEDs can be cut every 3, the provided soldering pads are very sensitive and can be ruined with too much heat, during de-soldering, or if cut improperly. We were aware of this before we soldered, so we wanted to create a system which would minimize the stress on the solder point. We came up with the solution to use header pins and pcb board. This way we could solder up all the pins for the lights, make the LEDs removable, and also make them secure. This minimized the amount of time the head was touching the LED strip, which ensured that we weren’t burning the connection. *To house the actuators within the box we knew we needed to create a cage that would secure the actuators in place without vibration and also allow the actuators to be removable in case, for some reason, they broke. We came up with a “cage” that would be partly secured to the back of the box with a housing around the actuators themselves. You can see more of our process on Marie Sester‘s website.
First prototype built by Mustafa Bagdatli, Genevieve Hoffman and Emily Webster.