Giving Form to the Voices of Lay-Citizens: Monumental-IT, an Intelligent, Robotic, Civic Monument

Abstract

In an increasingly digital society, it seems only apt that lay citizens be afforded interactive systems in public spaces to give form to their thoughts and desires as a collective of individual voices. While civic monuments are largely static, petrified representations of the past, sponsored by institutions and political authorities, Monumental-IT is an open-source, physical-digital (robotic) environment reconfigurable in real-time by lay citizens. We elaborate a process for generating and evaluating design alternatives for Monumental-IT, a cyber-physical artifact. Results suggest that the four distinct configurations of the robotic, multi-sensorial Monumental-IT evoke four distinct emotions in users. As well, users interacting with the prototype evaluate the design as reflecting their sentiments concerning historical events. Finally, users evaluated Monumental-IT's design to be more apt for our increasingly digital society than conventional monument design. Monumental-IT serves as a guide for designing large-scale computational artifacts for the public domain.