Rayuela: Delivering Serious Information Through Playful Interactive Installations

Rayuela is an interactive light installation created with the purpose of using art to draw attention to a serious issue plaguing our society: namely plastic usage and waste, and how its overuse and under recycling end up polluting the oceans and compromising the food chain by disintegrating into microplastics. To create an experience that could be playful enough to attract and engage people, while still subtly conveying a serious message, we chose the game of hopscotch as a backdrop for a playful experience, revealing at each step the journey a plastic bottle goes through during its lifecycle. Accordingly, we named the work Rayuela, which is the Spanish word for hopscotch. We built Rayuela as a modular system consisting of 11 light boxes, each telling a different fact about the plastic bottle's journey. Each time people jumped on a box, it turned the next one on, thus progressively revealing the story. As the work was designed for exhibition in a very large public festival lasting about a month, design considerations ranged form aesthetic and interactive aspects to robustness and reliability. In this paper, we describe the conceptual rationale for Rayuela, its design and building process, and the methods for automated data gathering we implemented. We then present the results of the field study, and discuss preliminary findings, as well as implications for future design.