After brainstorming and building multiple word maps, we agreed that using a fountain would be the perfect place to engage a community. Fountains are a place for people to gather, and what better way for people to interact with one another over a common cause? We were discussing multiple causes that could be projected, until Chasing Coral was mentioned; a documentary about the increasing demise of coral reefs. That's when we decided to fuse the two ideas together.

The projection starts with a dead coral reef being projected above the fountain. The reef is littered with trash. When someone gets close to the projection, some of the trash will vanish. Because we were envisioning a large fountain, multiple people would have to approach the projection in order to clear the entire fountain of trash. Once all the trash was cleared, the reef would be restored, and information would be projected onto the fountain so bystanders could further their efforts to help dying reefs. The purpose of our prototype was to raise awareness about coral reefs and the damage that is causing them to die. The below sketches show development of the prototype.

We built a cardboard fountain model with tape water spewing out, cardboard “people”, and a cardboard rig to hold the projector above the fountain model.

Music was found and illustrations were created to help show the death and life of the reef. Gifs were used to create more of an animated scene.

We researched information, facts, and organizations that we could project onto our miniature scene. We then simplified our information and selected a primary organization.

A big take away from the workshop was learning how to use Keynote to create the projected prototype. Below are examples of what our Keynote slides look like.