Research report

March 2004
Keri Facer, Futurelab

The full version of this report is available to download in pdf format - see box below. On this page you'll find the report's introduction.

Introduction

The Welcome to the Neighbourhood project is an attempt to develop a new approach to public understanding of science that empowers individuals to explore questions and ideas of interest to them in the solar system. The prototype is an experiment intended to discover what sorts of representational systems can encourage users to confidently explore questions of science and discover answers for themselves.

The installation itself consists of a moving signpost linked to a digital touchscreen. The signpost moves to point to an object within the solar system of the user's choice and displays the changing distance to that object on an LED screen on the sign. The digital touchscreen provides further information about this object, and offers users a range of different options for interacting with three-dimensional representations of objects within the solar system. The installation is designed to be located in an outdoors public space likely to be affiliated with a public institution (for example outside science centres or galleries) and to be usable by the full range of the public, with appropriate accessibility for individuals with physical disabilities. The installation can be described as a cross between street theatre, street furniture, installation art and science centre exhibit.

The over-arching aims of the project were:

• to empower users to conceive of astronomy not as a domain both literally and conceptually 'out there' (either in 'outer space' or in the scientific arena) but as a domain within which we live and breathe
• to facilitate confident engagement with scientific representations that can be interrogated by individuals in the ways they interrogate and interpret the signs and symbol systems of their local neighbourhood.

The Welcome to the Neighbourhood project consisted of two phases of development:

• Concept development and prototype testing.
• Design and build of first installation (funded by COPUS).

This report focuses on the first of these activities.

The technical development of the project was conducted in-house at Futurelab between Adam Nieman and Alex Burton (DTI-funded programmer), a process that enabled close cross fertilisation of ideas between programmer, content developer and research and technical teams at Futurelab. It uses open source software, Celestia, and has involved the development of a flexible HTML interface to allow modular changes in further development.

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