Diego Pulido

For this project, we were required to create a video prototype of an interactive installation/exhibit at a museum. The installation needed to be educational, entertaining and most of all, universally accessible.

We decided to create an intallation that would take place “in the future” but would be shown in the present. The main theme of the installation would be a recollection of different actions that “allowed humans to save planet Earth in the not-so-distant past”.

Anyone entering this museum installation would experience this exhibit as if they were 100 years in the future and they were learning of various things humans did in the past to save the planet’s natural resources. In this case, the “past” would be a repesentation of the actual “present” in real time (hence making it relevant to those visiting the installation).

Every component in this installation would be composed of a box divided in two parts. One part would be showing something humans “used to utilize” for any given purpose, and on the other side there would be an example of what humans “realized they could replace the previous item with” in order to be more environmentally conscious. Every box would turn back and fort to show the 2 items, as well as it would provide the necessary explanation of what “used to be utilized” and “why it was replaced for the second item”.

The main educational value is that the items that “humans discovered and decided to used in place of the previous items” are all things that we all have and could implement nowadays –in other words, the more environmentally friendly discoveries are not a science-fiction product: they are all things that we could use now if we wanted

For example: one box would show a regular light bulb and an energy-saving light bulb on the other side. Another box would show a car engine on one side and a bicycle chain on the other… etc.

Since the installation needed to be universally accessible, we designed an exhibit that would render all the information in a variety of ways for people who could not walk, see or hear.

The video (above) shows how each component of the installation displays the information in visual, readable, and audio form. The prototype also shows hand-rails for invident people to guide themselves with, as well as wide corridors for people on wheelchairs to explore the installation easilly.

Our ultimate goal with this video prototype was, besides making it universally accessible, to make everyone realize how much of an impact each and every single one of us could have in the environment by changing some of our habits and the way we use natural resources every day.

Everything that would be shown in the museum as a solution “from the future” could be implemented today. In other words, we hope that such an exhibit would become self-professing in a way that in the future, an installation like this could actually exist, in order to show “how humans really did save planet Earth” (and the human race, along the way).