Tent & City: A Non-Traditional Camping Experience

Objective: Design a concept for a non-traditional interface or interactive experience. Create something that engages users in physical space, and focus on how the concept integrates into the environment.

Tent & City Logo | Created by Amanda Batchelor

Tent & City is a space for the urban dweller looking to get outdoors but cannot seem to escape from the busy lifestyle of New York City.

This was a collaborative group project for Interface Design course at the University of Colorado, Boulder with two other designer and technologist Andrea DeVore and Joseph Ryan.

Context

During ideation, we started tossing around ideas from small spaces to the interior of an airport to alleyways and classrooms. However, when we really got discussing spaces we realized there are a lot of pre-existing infrastructure in the world that could be utilized and transformed for the public before we even start thinking about constructing yet another urban jungle. Through this discussing, we pinpointed the context in which our non-traditional interaction would take place: rooftops. In New York, there is approximately 14,000 acres of unused rooftop space.

Why not transform those 14,000 acres into an experience of a lifetime?

We agreed.

In our experience, we decided to tackle a rooftop in Brooklyn, New York due to the low and large building profiles that gave us a lot of space to work with. More specifically, we will be taking over the rooftop of an apartment building with the address of 136 Carlton Ave. Brooklyn, NY.

Content

Once our space and location were determined, we started thinking how are we going to utilize all this space?

We bounced around idea of creating a completely artistic experience with lights or completely transforming it into an outdoor gallery to transforming the space around us into these expressive art walks. However, we felt all those ideas weren’t utilizing the space well and in all just was not unique enough. We finally started thinking about the space that we are surrounded that New Yorkers may not be able to endure… the mountains, trees, wildlife. We came around our answer: bring the environment of Colorado to the streets of bustling city.

How would we want to convey this environmental experience on a rooftop. We decided to create a persona so we could answer our question on the ‘how’.

Meet Chris. Our Rugged Yuppie. City dweller with an inner outside enthusiast looking to break out on to the streets of New York.

*Christopher Jenkins Persona | Created by Amanda Batchelor + Andrea Devore*

Now that you have met Chris, we decided to design for him and his like minded rugged yuppies. With a motivations to get outside, we wanted to create an experience that would be intended to be used for a one to two night experience equipped with a luxury glamping-style sleeping arrangement, an outdoor common area with a fully stocked kitchen, and an outdoor environment flourished with grass, trees, and flowers indigenous to the Rocky Mountains. To convey our content we have made a moodboard to explain how we want the look and feel of this outdoor experience to be:

*Rustic Luxury was the look and feel we were trying to capture for our rooftop experience.*

Concept

Tent & City is a space for the urban dweller looking to get outdoors but cannot seem to escape from the busy lifestyle of New York City through an experience to augment the reality of a person placing them in a world vastly different from the city without ever leaving it. The rooftop experience would be used as transformative one to two night glamping experience.

Full Context Rendering

To demonstrate the content, we decided to create a soundscape to tell the story of Chris, our rugged yuppie, and how he would go from work to Tent & City. Throughout the video, Chris is taken from work to the Brooklyn location offering a full sensory journey.

Audio-Visual Journey Video | Created by Amanda, Andrea and Joe

Hero Shot

The Hero Shot depicts the rugged yuppie with his partner on the rooftop experience that would be Tent & City in our location in Brooklyn, New York to the augmented reality of Colorado to further convey our concept.

Interaction Diagram

Since we could not physically visit our location, we used web tools such as google street view to measure our rooftop in Brooklyn, NY to determine exact dimensions we would be working with to create an accurate Interaction Diagram. In order to further communicate the luxury camping site setting, we created a Rhino model of the transformed rooftop.

*Perspective View of Tent & City Rooftop Rending | Created by Joe Ryan*

For further explanation, check out our full presentation on Tent & City here.

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