Developing an Intuitive Website for Prototyping Creative Media Facade Content

Media facades have successfully enabled interactions between citizens and buildings, yet they still mostly function as top-down urban infrastructure, with content commissioned by the government or private owners. One of the key reasons for that is the lack of user-friendly and public-facing prototyping tools to design creative content for media facades, making them out of reach for regular citizens, artists and other creative content providers. This paper describes our preliminary work in addressing this gap with a prototype of an online platform for media facade content creation, with features such as built-in templates, editing tools, and 'copy and paste' of lighting patterns across different sections of the facade. Crucially, the project is concerned with making the interface intuitive enough to facilitate the design of creative content for media facades by regular citizens, even if they lack coding skills, thus enabling self-expression and a greater diversity in public media art creation.