Global garden
Christopher Drackett, Victoria Fong, Judy Ko, Saki Tanaka, Salma Ting · 2004
Recent controversies surrounding the judging of Olympic events, has created the need for an audience participatory judging system. The stage for this participation will be the diving and gymnastics events at the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens. We researched the Olympic audience and studied collaborative group interaction. This process made us realize that a traditional, quantitative scoring system would not adequately address the needs of an international Olympic audience. Our solution is the Global Garden, a wearable interface that defies the conventional process of entering a "score" and displaying it. It consists of a set of interactive devices worn on the hand that glow green when a user claps, and changes colors based on different hand gestures that follow. By using applause, the intuitive and international sign of appreciation, the audience itself becomes an interface. People provide the input and output of a universal "score," heightening everyone's desires to participate and eliminating the need for excessive infrastructure. We achieved our goals to design a novel, intuitive (instruction-less) interaction that connects members of the audience to the events they watch and to each other.