Coloring time with CodaChrome

Abstract

As new computationally enhanced tools become available, there is an opportunity to give more and more people access to new ways for personal, creative expression. We designed a new computational construction kit to allow children and adults to design and build interactive, dynamic color patterns on electronic jewelry and sculptures. We designed activities to introduce CodaChrome, our color pattern creation environment, along with ideas about color and material properties to children in the context of immersive design experiences. The process and product of these experiences reveal the way young people understand abstract concepts related to the notions of space, time and space-time interrelationships. This thesis reports on the design and evaluation of the activities, the development of the CodaChrome system, and the evolution of our methodology for investigating the formation of concepts like synchronicity and concurrency and their dependency on spatial connotations. The presented case studies contribute to the ongoing research on the media-dependence of classic epistemological questions regarding space and time, as manifested in the diversity of children's styles in making and thinking about dynamic color animations on light modules, which can be arranged in arbitrary spatial topologies.