Net Work: Lessons from collaboratively designing an interactive artwork
Jon Bird, Mark d’Inverno, Jane Prophet · Goldsmiths Research Online · 2006
For the last 18 months we have been involved indesigning and building the software and hardware for aprototype floating interactive artwork, Net Work, that isconstructed from autonomous light-emitting buoys thatrespond to their physical environment and the state ofneighbouring buoys. The completed artwork will beinstalled at a London location (such as the dockside basinadjacent to Wapping Art) and in further venues across theUK (potentially next to the pier in Herne Bay).The design process has involved the collaboration ofartists, designers, programmers and engineers. Although Jane Prophet had an artistic vision of the project, initiallythere were no clearly defined collective goals or individualroles. Consequently, the project has not employed atraditional engineering problem-solving methodology. Theproject’s goals, and the means of achieving them, havedeveloped through an open-ended process that hasbenefited from the contributions of different collaborators.In this paper we describe some lessons we have learntfrom using an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach tobuild the prototype of Net Work. It is our belief that thisapproach could be productively applied a large class of design problems where there is no clear, well-defined goal.