Location: Irving Square Park, Brooklyn, New York

Irving Square Park can be described as Bushwick’s town square. This park takes up the entire length of a city block, and is popular with picnickers, dog owners, and families holding events and festivities.

History ¹

The likely honoree of this lovely park is Washington Irving. He was a short story writer, essayist, poet, travel writer, biographer, historian, and columnist who created some of the most popular essays and tales in American literature. In 1832 Irving was welcomed back to New York as the first American author to have achieved international fame. In 1896 the park was graded and planted, and new curving paths were laid. It was enclosed with an iron picket fence. Three years later all of the City of Brooklyn and the County of Kings were incorporated into the City of New York. Irving Square was laid out with curving paths and planted with trees. In 1905 a brick shelter with bluestone trim was erected in the center of the park. Between 2006 and 2008 two major projects totaling $3 million completely renovated the park and playground and added a public plaza and garden area. Irving Square Park now features new historic gates, a small performance space and a re-graded central lawn with pear trees, evergreens and flowers.

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Research, Observe, Document

AEIOU

Activity	Environment	Iteraction	Object	User
Cycling	Play Pen	Talking	Football	Kids
Team Games	Dog Run	Walking	Cycle	Parents
Playing	Sidewalks	Sitting	E-Bikes	Couples
Smoking	Lawn	Listening	Scooters	Elderly
Running	Entrance/Exit	Waiting	Sockets	Dogs
Skating	Stairs	Eating	Skateboard	Birds
Skateboarding	Fountain Area	Drinking	Fountain	Squirrels
		Charging	Benches
			Trash bins
			Slides & Swings
			Lamp Posts
			Tables
			Flag-Post & Flag
			Fences
			Trees
			Strollers
			Bags
			Cigarettes
			Water bottles
			Sling Bags
			Headphones
			Mobile Phones
			Speakers
			Food
			Drinks
			Chess Tables

Behavioral Mapping

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Observations

• Lower end of the park (i.e. Wilson Ave End) has only a few people.
• Upper end of the park (i.e. KnickerBocker Ave End) is more crowded.
• Entrances/Exits on Weirfield St. and Knickerbocker Ave. / Halsey St. are popular ones.
• People in groups of 4-5 tend to sit on isolated end of the park.

Interesting Facts

• E-Bike charging point in a park was interesting to see.
• Diffrent sections of park had different genre of music played by people.

Brainstorming Tree

While brainstorming, A concept of lamp posts following people also inspired us while looking up for interaction ideas. It led to the idea of artificial eyes following people when they crossed a tree/lamp-post struck us. It’d be interesting to how people will react to eyes of a lamp-post or a tree that’ll follow them.

Apart from their reaction, we’d also project the idea of how government’s eyes i.e. surveillance cameras follow people around and they don’t react to it while they react to artificial eyes following them.

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Concept Sketch

We’ve planned to put out a set of artificial eyes on the lamp post and let them follow the people crossing by. Following is a sketch how we planned it’d look like -

Eye movement when someone passes by

Selected Site

A Lamp Post near kids play area

Prototyping

We did a quick prototyping of this concept using iPad running a processing code that sets the eyes to look at wherever a touch event occurs on screen. While Taranpreet was crossing I moved my finger on screen from left to right to imitate our interactive installation.

While we were prototyping, a couple of kids passed by and we tested out this concept and it was very interesting to see how they reacted to it. Of course they knew it was me who was controlling those eyes, but we were able to figure out that it attracted a number of people and kids when “artificial lamp-post eyes” were rolling from left to right.