Art festivals allow you to escape the real world for a while and dive into a temporal, fascinating realm of art appreciation, like-minded people, and freedom. The annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the most prominent art festival in Edinburgh and attracts millions of visitors each year. While it offers a taste of a different and rather busy world, visitors might perceive the range of attractions as an absolute overstimulation.
Instead of adding to the vast spectrum of entertainment, this project aims to offer a break for your senses by creating a space. SenseBreak is based on the festival’s data and offers a space to help visitors.
A brief survey of ten participants showed that locals and visitors complain that the festival is too loud, crowded, and expensive. For our installation we are reimagining three mentioned annoying sources of noise of the Edinburgh Fringe in an immersive installation, namely bag pipes, the sound of trolley wheels on cobblestones, and drums. Based on literature, we aimed to construct a calming space.
At the Design with Data Exhibition in InSpace, visitors can enter the pavilion through semi-transparent chiffon curtains and encounter a calming space of lavender scent, relaxing music, and aurora projections. They can interact with the sounds by triggering sensors and enjoy a calmer version of those mentioned annoying sounds. A post-experience survey showed more relaxed visitors.
This project is in collaboration with Edinburgh Fringe and allowed access to their event data base. It was done as part of the Design Informatics Programme.