I was on a roll and now it has been a while. But it is Saturday moning, I am sitting here at my computer avoiding all the work I have to do this weekend. Just for a bit more…then I will get going.
This Wednesday is the start of an event at Miraikan, a science museum in Tokyo. Everyday from Wednesday to Sunday there will be two large screen presentations of artwork from Kazuo Oga, an art director and background artist for Studio Ghibli films (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, etc.). The theme of the event is “human and nature” and they hope that by showing nature scenes, people can reflect on beauty outside of the concrete fortress and strive to preserve the nature we still have.
After these presentations the museum likes to receive questionnaire responses so that they can judge the effectiveness of the presentation, both enjoyment-wise and for the visitors’ learning and reflection.

Way back in November one of the organizers saw a system I developed during my internship and was interested in using it as a novel way for people to reply to a questionnaire (this is how I managed an internship extension). So, we’ve redesigned the application and this is what will happen:

After the presentation people will be asked to come answer questions about their experience. In the “questionnaire space” there will be leaf shaped cards scattered around. Each leaf is printed with one question and QRcodes for replying to the question, and reading other responses. In Japan most people can capture QRcodes with their mobile phone cameras and the codes can be decoded into text: in this case an email address (to send an email response to a question) or URL (to go see other responses). Some questions have multiple choices for response and a visitor can choose by capturing the code next to their choice and sending an email to the address inside.
Doing this we can present the responses back in real time. We will project a tree/leaf-themed visualization of responses being returned. Sure - this might create bias but my view is that questionnaires are super biased anyway and we are hoping that given a novel way to answer them, people will be curious, have fun, be engaged and generally be more interested in the feedback they provide.

This weekend I have to work on that visualization. I have made several versions already and most of the back-end is in place and good but we’ve been going over redesigns for the interface and I have not yet had the chance to implement them (or have not yet taken then chance…yikes!) I am a little scared about not being prepared but it is weird, another part of me is pretty calm and confident that everything will come into place. I think that I have possibly finally lost the tendency to panic and feel really anxious before big events / demos / presentations. I will try my hardest and even if something goes wrong people generally understand.

I am more nervous about the first day - the directory of our laboratory is friends with a director at Miraikan, Mamoru Mohri and he arranged a chance for us to meet him. Okay and guess what - this guy has been in space! I am meeting an astronaut! I had not thought about it much before but since this meeting was arranged the amazing-ness of space travel has started to dawn on me. It is an experience that few have and it is utterly (you can send your kicks by mail) out of this world.

Fun!