Given such a broad prompt to “create impact” in the city, we began with some general inspiration interviews with people who have lived in Pittsburgh for 15+ years. There were a number of themes that popped up from these interviews, some of which were: (1) commuting or getting from point A to point B, (2) interactions within and between distinct communities, (3) the transformation of the city, and (4) engagement within the city by its inhabitants.

We took a long walk in Pittsburgh, following one of the city’s most distinct and diverse streets, Penn Avenue. Along the street, you are able to see layers of time: from the old and historic to the modern. We witness the distinct character of neighborhoods like Garfield, the almost suburban modernity of Bakery Square, and the clash of old meets new in East Liberty. My team members (all new to Pittsburgh) got a sense of the changes the city is undergoing.

In generating and clustering ideas, we saw certain patterns emerge, one being that of some kind of beacon or barometer through which the “health” of a neighborhood could be displayed. We wondered how such a “beacon” might facilitate a 1-1 interaction between the installation and the user while collecting data that could be useful to community organizers, policy makers, and more in the city. This lead to the concept of Ditto.

We storyboarded a scenario to show the user experience for someone coming across Ditto for the first time. First, we imagine that they will be drawn to the odd form and mirror of Ditto. Then when Ditto recognizes their face, the user will see Ditto mimic their face. When finished, Ditto will give the user a ticket with facial expression printed on it. This ticket pushes to the website where further information and analysis of this data is available.

Using an SDK called Affectiva and Xcode developer tools in Objective C, I coded the Ditto's app which reads expressions reads faces and mimics them. The code recognizes faces that the camera sees and finds the dominant emoji present SDK collects data on seven metrics of emotion: anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. By no means an expert coder, I love to create "working" prototypes to test my ideas.

We then took Ditto out into the world to see how the public interacted with him. Passersby found pleasure in the cute but strange interaction. Moving forward, we would like to bring Ditto to different and more diverse communities as well as test the interactions that occur when we are not so close to passersby. If we were able to create a more refined and sturdier prototype, Ditto could stand on its own as one half of our concept.