StepScape¶
A device that gradually adds musical instruments and shifts the colors toward warmer tones as people take steps, encouraging them to develop
Background¶
Francesco and I worked on this project together. We mapped our areas of interests and defined key concepts at the intersection; Movement and Public Spaces. My research is on dance and movement in public spaces, and how it can create a rupture on normativity; while his is on club culture, dancing and energy generation from movement. Our combined research topic was on using data to generate alternative movements in public spaces.
Intelligences Definition:¶
Intelligence is the capacity of a system to perceive something from its environment, interpret it according to its own logic, act based on it, and adapt over time.
Communication Definition:¶
Expressing oneself in order to convey an idea, inform, or convince regardless of intention.
Artifact Definition:¶
Wearable device for live data collection by getting data of people dancing and moving in a spesific public space and turning their data on steps, route and heartbeat into a collective installation with the help of an centerpiece using sound and light to create communication between a group of people and the environment.
The Artifact¶
In the end we ended up creating 2 artifact. One is a wearable with a step counter sensor in it.The other one is a translucent piece with a speaker and LEDs.
For more details about the artifact visit our Hackster Documentation.
Traces¶
Cognitive Traces¶
Looking back, the thinking behind StepScape evolved in a way I did not fully anticipate at first. At the very beginning, the goal was fairly modest: generate some kind of output, a sound or a colour change, based on the sensor input through movement. That felt like enough to prove the concept. But somewhere around the second day, something shifted. The idea of layering instruments, rather than just toggling a single sound on or off, came into the conversation, and once it did, it was hard to go back to the simpler version. It opened up a completely different way of thinking about the piece: not as a switch, but as something that accumulates, that builds. The experience for the person wearing the device would be gradual and earned rather than abrupt. Once we got that working we asked: what else could grow in the same way? That is when we started thinking seriously about the lights, and how colour temperature could mirror the arc of the sound. It is a small detail, but it made the piece feel more coherent, like the sound and light were part of the same language rather than two separate outputs running in parallel. What I found interesting about this process is that the thinking was not linear. It was more like each solution revealed a new question, and following those questions is what gave the project its final shape.
Moral Traces¶
The collaboration between Francesco and me was genuinely smooth and so much fun, which I think is worth acknowledging because it isn’t always the case. Work was divided in a way that felt natural rather than forced. We each gravitated toward the parts that interested us most. There was no single moment where the project felt like it belonged more to one person than the other, which I think mattered for the quality of what we made. We used AI tools throughout the process, mainly for writing and debugging code. I want to be honest about that, because I think the question of how to use these tools responsibly is interesting. Our approach was to treat AI as a collaborator in a specific and limited sense: it could help us move through a technical problem faster, or suggest an approach we had not considered, but we always tried to understand what the code was actually doing before we used it. When something was not working, we didn’t just paste in a fix. We tried to understand why it had failed in the first place. That felt like the right balance: using the tool to accelerate the work without letting it replace the thinking.
Technical Traces¶
The path to the final artifact was not entirely clean. Early on, we were working with a speaker salvaged from an old radio, and it caused more trouble than it was worth. It was difficult to wire up properly, and the sound quality was poor enough that it undermined what we were trying to achieve aesthetically. We spent more time on it than we should have before stepping back. A conversation with some of the teachers helped clarify something that seems obvious: using old hardware was not adding any conceptual value to the project. It was not making a statement about repurposing or obsolescence. It was just making things harder. So we switched to a modern Bluetooth speaker, and the difference was immediate. Better sound, less friction, more time to focus on the parts of the project that actually mattered. That decision to let go of the old speaker was a small one in the scheme of things, but it is a good example of something I have come to think is important in making: knowing when to stop trying to fix something and redirect the energy instead. The project ended up better for it, not just technically, but because we had more headspace to think about the experience we were actually trying to create.