Sparklevision

The voyage begins

The design process began by choosing a neighborhood in Pittsburgh to explore and investigate on foot. We were tasked with mapping the character of this neighborhood, and documenting the journey in a way that told the story of the place. I chose Mount Washington, which is a unique and well-known neighborhood: it overlooks looks downtown Pittsburgh and the confluence of the three rivers which shape the city’s unique topography. This neighborhood is seen as a microcosm of Pittsburgh as a whole: it is both stunning and rich with urban character, yet it is also representative of Pittsburgh’s blue-collar, steel-city roots. It is bounded by a popular public promenade with old, stately homes overlooking the city on one edge, and is comprised of small, predominately blue-collar residential neighborhoods and “small-town” commercial streets on the other. 

I documented my exploration of this neighborhood through a mapping of my own “personal journeys” through Mount Washington, as well as through an “emotional mapping” of the neighborhood’s terrain (inspired by the Situationist’s International’s mapping methods). My journeys on Mount Washington have spanned a several year time frame, as my mother lives in this neighborhood. The maps below describe these journeys, as both personal and observational experiences of the city:

Discovering the viewfinder & modernist platforms

On one of my walks down Mount Washington's main promenade, Grandview Avenue, which overlooks downtown Pittsburgh, I paid particular attention to ​touristic aspects of this street. There are several Modernist-era viewing platforms that hover over the cliff here, which allow tourists to have a magnificent view of downtown. And the street is dotted with wonderful "viewfinder machines," which allow people a more close-up view of the city for a quarter. It was the first time I gave these machines much thought—I realized that they are both technological relics that still maintain a presence in many tourist spaces, as well as being beautiful machines, expressly designed for people's voyeuristic pleasure.

Stakeholder map

After many exploratory trips down Grandview Avenue, I then drew up a stakeholder map. This map represents the variety of people that can be found on Grandview Avenue on any given (pleasant) day in Pittsburgh. I placed these stakeholders on a tiered wedding-cake, atop one of Grandview's viewing platforms—because these platforms are frequently used as portraiture sites for wedding parties and newlyweds. From the bottom to the top of the map, the stakeholders I identified are as follows: parishioners, partiers, families, runners, tourists, wedding parties, photographers, Pittsburgh's local "celebrities," and lovers:

Generative research:

I then facilitated a generative research session with local Pittsburgh natives. This exercise was designed to uncover how these locals "see" their city. The purpose of the session was to understand what natives feel is important, lovely, scary, and unique about their beloved hometown—and most importantly—to hear their personal stories of Pittsburgh.

I asked them to populate a blank map of the city with images and drawings about how they imagine their hometown. I asked them to put emphasis on documenting the feelings they have about the neighborhoods they frequent, as well as the ones they stay away from—and why. The session evolved into a fruitful discussion about Pittsburgh's unique charms and odd spaces...and all of the participants told stories about the things they loved and hoted most about Pittsburgh.

If our robots could talk...

I then began to focus on the notion of what our technology could say about how we live our lives. If Our Robots Could Talk (below) was a speculative exploration of my own Pittsburgh neighborhood that I lived in at the time: it is a light-hearted jest about what my across-the-street neighbors' machines might say about their owners.

100 ideas: 1 week

Nick and Gill, our professors, then posed a challenge to the studio: generate 100 ideas in one week. These ideas could be completely ridiculous, profound, or anywhere in between—the purpose was to keep generating ideas in great quantities to let themes emerge. Some of the more strange, silly, and interesting ideas I had are documented below: these range from holographic houses and pirate ships projected onto abandoned lots across the city, to digital hotpants, to the secret love lives of the city's many odd characters, to stories speculating on the origins of Pittsburgh's zombie legacy, to fantasies about metallic birds being born from the smokestacks of old steel mills, to the story of one lonely lamp post:

Sparklevision

After these 100 sketches, I began to notice a few themes occuring—and my idea for "Sparklevision" nebulously emerged as a result.​ I wanted to find opportunities that allowed people to "see" both their digital and civic lives in new ways, using new technologies. I was also interested in the idea of physical objects becoming containers for precious and personal digital data. And I was consumed by all the stories—both fabricated and true—that emerged from my research sessions, and from my own overworked brain.

I narrowed my favorite ideas down to a few, as shown below. These ideas all had an overarching visual aspect to them that seemed "sparkly," for lack of a better word...

​Remembering what I'd forgotten, and the final idea

As the end of the semester neared, I lost clarity about my project as I explored a few too many of my "sparkly" ideas. I began to understand that many of these ideas were ungrounded in a physical space, and so I went back to Mount Washington for inspiration. And I remembered those viewfinders on Grandview Avenue....

Witness, by SparklevisionTM

Witness became the final iteration on the Sparklevision theme, and my final presentation for the Digital Cities studio, which included two boards and a prototype viewfinder.

Witness uses the viewfinders on Grandview Avenue as repurposed augmented-reality storytelling machines. The user of Witness would know this was not an "ordinary" viewfinder by the fact that its eyepieces are now replaced with faintly-glowing digital screens, beckoning them to investigate this strange machine.

Once the user/participant pays the machine, they can look through the eyepieces at downtown Pittsburgh, now overlaid with "story bubbles" that they can choose from. The stories are fictions about real places in Pittsburgh—they depict film-noir versions of the city's lies, loves, and crimes—giving the viewer a fictionalized, voyeuristic journey through a fantasy Pittsburgh. The stories are intended to delight the viewer, and are used as an overlay on the physical geography of the city that offer the viewer a "new take" on the old Pittsburgh. 

A mockup of what a viewer would see through the Witness viewfinder is shown below:​

The intent and implementation of Witness is described in the image below—this presentation board describes Witness: what it is, who it's for, how it works, and the proposed phased development of its implementation as a network of urban storytelling devices.

The viewfinders would be hacked by the Sparklevision design team to serve up fictions crafted by local Pittsburgh writers about their city. These stories displayed by the viewfinders would change out periodically, as new stories are submitted. And this social exchange between the writers, designers, technologists, and story consumers could form a new urban community centered on the imagined delights of a fictional Pittsburgh.

As interest in the project grew, Witness could be expanded to new cities, and new, touristic urban objects, creating a network of urban storytelling machines...