MADBALL
Bluecadet partnered with the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York to create a signature digital installation for the 60th annual Mad Ball gala. The museum tasked us with creating a memorable interactive experience that was an innovative and unexpected celebration of design and the creative process—true to the mission of the Museum of Arts and Design.
MY ROLE:
UX and Visual Designer. A fast and furious two-week sprint in a 3-man team to conceptualize, design, and develop a one-night digital installation. I sketched, body-stormed and quickly prototyped ideas with our Creative Director and Technical Director. I went on to develop a UX, visual, and motion system for the final product.
Designed at Bluecadet for the Museum of Art and Design
Reliving the Classic Fun of Pong
Inspired by the playful touch-based interactions in the museum’s current Sonic Arcades exhibition, we built a gala-friendly tabletop video game based on the arcade classic Pong.
The installation ran for one night only, so our usual considerations for permanent exhibits were tossed out the window. Instead of a traditional input mechanism, this game used a much less expensive but unexpected controller – capacitive fruit.
Bluecadet x MAD Promotional Video
Process
Detecting touches on fruit was fairly straightforward using off-the-shelf capacitive sensors (https://learn.adafruit.com/circuit-playground-fruit-drums). After some quick searching, my creative director got to work to on our first prototype — connecting arrow key commands to a grape.
Thereafter, I quickly prototyped with paper, bluetape and exposed wires to help us work out the nuances of gameplay and the physical requirements effectively before handing off to our tech director to write our first line of code.
First prototype: a grape and an apple
Fun fact: Bodega oranges were the most resilient and lasted longer for inputs
Screen recording of gameplay
Design
Heavily inspired by retro arcade games, I designed several patterns and UI elements as well as countdown and victory screen lockups. I also provided quick references and motion direction for our tech director to implement in code. I made sure to pull certain colors and visual elements from the Gala’s branding to ensure visual consistency throughout the venue.
One design and UX decision we made was to ramp up the visual complexity of the background patterns throughout the game to fuel into the chaos that comes when a match nears its end.
A MAD Night
Crowds gathered, pictures were taken, and victories were secured. Over the course of the evening, we composted over three large buckets of apples, oranges, and bananas. We even peeled and ate one of our controllers when its authenticity was questioned.
TEAM:
Executive Creative Director: Brett Renfer
Tech Director: Benjamin Bojko
UX Designer: Janet Lu
Visual Designer: Janet LuAWARDS:
SEGD finalist 2018 - Interactive Experience
FWA OF THE DAY 2018 (January 29)