Creating social value of interactive media installation: case study of designing "wish spark"

We present a public interactive media installation, "Wish Spark" that evokes people's participation, sharing and giving. Different from art-based interactive media installation, Wish Spark has a practical feature; an aid for making donation a pleasurable, meaningful, and interactive activity. Our main concept is to make a system that appeals donation behavior as an act of fun not as a buggy activity, and finally lead people to make freewill contribution for society. This paper presents design process on how to make synergic effect of charitable giving as well as makes people have fun together. The act of throwing coin into the fountain was found to be a powerful and traditional way of making donation, thus it was used as a main metaphor for our solution. When people throw coins with their wish into Wish Spark, light and sound expressions occur to create a pleasurable user experience. The corrected coins are represented as people's wishes. Wish Spark is suggested to install in the landing gate of the airport because people can easily have a chance to give donation with small effort. In this project, we suggest a possibility to extend the social value of media installation by introducing interaction design process between human and public environment.