What do mushroom root systems, a nocturnal game of peek-a-boo and an accounting of man’s impact on the environment around him have in common? There is likely a very complex, intertwining answer that would take three different degrees to explain.
The simple answer is they all have students from the University of Waterloo Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business as the common link, and those experiencing Lights On this year are better for it.
A trio of teams from the school earned the right to have their projects displayed on campus during the month-long festival, with each of them using interactive features to both entertain visitors and educate them at the same time. David Han, the GBDA 412 program instructor at UW, said the task students were presented with earlier in the term was to think about the land itself when coming up with their non-human concepts for this project.
“I wanted to think about the land acknowledgement as more than just this ceremonial thing we do, so the design brief I gave these guys was to come up with an interactive installation that dealt with, as a theme, the local non-human activity in the past, present or future,” he said. “The first task was to come up with a pitch for the idea for this project, and each student was tasked with that. Part of the pitch was doing a lot of research and I think that’s where this idea came from.”
The idea he referenced was Fungi: Beyond the Eye, a project that invites viewers to explore the non-human, present world of fungi roots (mycelium) that are local to the city. Dasha Sterehova, the Fungi project lead, talked about how that team spent hours at the T.J. Dolan natural area by John Street researching the local growth. The project allows viewers to scan a QR code, which then enables their smartphone to become a makeshift joystick. At that point, they can pilot a dot around the screen to see how each mushroom’s mycelium maps out and helps create an intricate system below ground.
“In the early stages of coming up with this, I went to the Dolan trail and just walked around to see what I could find because I wanted to find the exact species of mushrooms that were there,” she said. “It’s really hard to find that online, so I ended up taking a bunch of pictures and then did a reverse image search. There was a lot of going there in person in the early stages, and we also had our media creation team go out and take photos and videos that could have been used in the installation. So we were able to implement a kind of real-world field research, if you will, in this project.”
Han said this project was only assigned to students 10 weeks ago, and the winning three teams had to move their idea from concept through the pitch process where it was evaluated in groups of peers. In total, 12 ideas were presented as possible installations and that was whittled down to the eventual winning trio.
“Every team had a sort of marketing component, so they had their own websites and social media channels about the projects,” he said. “They had then developed prototypes, which they displayed and got feedback from some community members – including some from Lights On Stratford. Then at the end of the term in November, we had a jury made up of Lights On Stratford staff, some from the city and a couple of faculty members. They presented their final projects, demonstrated them and then the jury selected three to be on the big screens.”
Sterehova said the initial feedback they were getting proved useful, especially the phone interactivity. Ironically, part of that feedback was people didn’t want to be on their phones while looking at the installation.
“A lot of people during the final prototype when we were showing it off, they found it more interesting than they thought they would, which was an interesting piece of feedback,” she said. “They stood around at it longer than they thought they would, which was great to hear.”
Joining Sterehova on the Fungi team was Chantel Wai (project manager), Cameron Dunn (tech lead), Sara Kanana, Olivia Dunfoed, Zenia Rangwala (coms and marketing), Anthony Chen, Lena Shiffler (media creation), and Alex Robertson (programming and tech); Nocturnal Visions was comprised of Bernice Heng (project lead), Gleb Ellik (tech lead), Nathenia Meng (media creation), Jodi Ng, Jason Feng, Jerry Chen, Joel Kim, Mirza Baig, and Macy LeConte (marketing); A Living Entity’s team was made up of Fiona Feng (project lead), Cathay Le (project manager), Christopher Ho (project manager), Finn Duncan-Snobel, Kelly Wu (communications and marketing), Adriano Campisi, Yolanda Liu (media creation), Caden Chan and Steven Poung (programming and tech).
Lights On Stratford runs until January 19, 2025, going Thursdays through Sundays from 5-10 p.m.
