Net Work: Lessons from collaboratively designing an interactive artwork

For the last 18 months we have been involved in designing and building the software and hardware for a prototype floating interactive artwork, Net Work, that is constructed from autonomous light-emitting buoys that respond to their physical environment and the state of neighbouring buoys. The completed artwork will be installed at a London location (such as the dockside basin adjacent to Wapping Art) and in further venues across the UK (potentially next to the pier in Herne Bay).

The design process has involved the collaboration of artists, designers, programmers and engineers. Although Jane Prophet had an artistic vision of the project, initially there were no clearly defined collective goals or individual roles. Consequently, the project has not employed a traditional engineering problem-solving methodology. The project’s goals, and the means of achieving them, have developed through an open-ended process that has benefited from the contributions of different collaborators. In this paper we describe some lessons we have learnt from using an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to build the prototype of Net Work. It is our belief that this approach could be productively applied a large class of design problems where there is no clear, well-defined goal.