RAINY BAR

Overview

Rainy Bar is a public interactive space at the side of streets, aiming to explore the way how people enjoy the rain. People inside can interact with music and raindrops.

Context

This is a 21-day workshop project. I led a team of 4 and finally our project won the 1st prize among all the teams.

Role
Team lead, Sketch, Modeling&Rendering

Team
Yohe Wang, Zhengang Lou, Dou Mao, Xiong Xiao

Duration
3 Weeks

Tools
Photoshop, Rhino, Keyshot, Arduino, Processing

Many people hate rainy days because of its inconvenience, and designers constantly solve hundreds of problems with rainy days.

However, they are more likely to avoid and resist the inconvenience of the rain. Why not, from a different perspective, take advantage of the features of rain to create a new experience of rainy days and let people begin to enjoy the rain?

In the art works of musics, photographs and movies, there are mainly three enjoyable emotion of people towards the rain: Peaceful, Refresh, Release.

Keyfindings:

Most people hate the rainy days because of its inconvenience rather than hating the rain itself. They don’t like to get wetted by the rain but like to watch the rain indoors. Also, we found the Visual & Auditory features of rain are most compelling to people.

Questions

—Describe a rainy day which brought you a good mood.
—What is your feelings, in human’s five senses, about the rain?
—Describe your feelings of rain through some words ?

Interviewees

Keyfindings:

Rainy day provides an obscure, soft, misty, low contrast scene, and rain sound is a kind of white noise, making people feel peaceful, and focused. Based on these features, the rainy day provides people a kind of anti-social ambience and make people feel relaxed.

Final Concept

Inspired by the attraction of rainy vision & sound, we decided to design a public interactive installation at the curbside, Rainy Bar, for people to retreat from the hustle and bustle of urbanism in rainy days. 

How it works?

When people first come into Rainy Bar, they will saw the rain curtain and hear peaceful rain sound due to the default setting of the peaceful mode and then they can change the interaction mode by using the control panel in front of the rainy screen.

What can Rainy Bar do?

Rainy Bar provides people an immersive space to interact with raindrop and music, when they play music, the raindrop will fall according to the melody.

-We use infrared sensor to recognize the interaction of users’ action

-7 red sensors map 7 scales, 2 white sensors switch 2 modes, Blue sensor controls volume

-Users can create their own interactive ways, such as Chinese Kungfu

-Specific sensor control corresponding raindrops to fall

-Different height of the hand control different pitch and volume