Playing with
light
Thi Nguyen Bachelor of Design (Visual Communication) (2012)
Chromatic Motions at Circular Quay
UWS graduate Thi Nguyen has made a splash on the Sydney interactive design scene, creating an installation for VIVID LIGHT 2013 based on work she began during her Honours research. Her interactive light sculpture, Chromatic Motions, which was located at East Circular Quay during the festival, went on to win the Event Experience – Consumer category at the Sydney Design Awards – beating established studios Frost* Design and Reborn. ‘My fourth year at UWS was very pivotal in my career, because it was an opportunity to research anything I wanted to do. I was able to go back to my earlier interests in electronic arts, to study design in interactive environments,’ Thi says. Chromatic Motions is a virtual instrument that allows users to paint 8
GradLife Autumn 2014
on a virtual canvas with their body. The installation analyses live feed from either single or multiple users and converts shape and motion into colours. Though the interaction is very simple – touch creates colour – the aim of the work is to capture the hearts and minds of its audience by ‘facilitating meaningful and memorable experiences through play’. ‘Chromatic Motions explores how design can influence our lives by interacting with us and shaping the ways in which we interact with each other,’ Thi wrote in a case study on the work. ‘It illustrates how play and interactive design responds to human stimuli in
order to change the way we reconfigure ourselves by addressing our individual, social and environmental needs.’ Not only was her pitch for Chromatic Motions to be part of VIVID the first proposal she had entered for a public interactive design project, she was surprised by her Sydney Design Awards win. ‘I just wanted to enter to see how I would benchmark against all the other studios, so I was totally surprised. I didn’t even attend the awards night,’ Thi says. Thi graduated from the Bachelor of Design in Visual Communication at UWS