BENGALURU: Inspired by the crowd in the subway, Takuma Nakata rightfully named his installation as Walk, at DesignUp, a festival that explores the integration of technology and design, which ended on Saturday. In the city for the festival, Nakata came up with this installation in collaboration with Patricia Reiners, a User Interface designer whom he met during the Adobe Creative resident programme.
Interaction designing is a machine learning process with a bit of human interaction. Walk is an interactive installation where people walking in front of the screen is used as a medium to draw images on the screen. “In Tokyo, subways are jam-packed and I thought it will be nice to use them as a medium. Commuters don’t realise it until they see themselves in the projection,” said 30-year-old Nakata.
Hailing from Kyoto, Nakata has always been amused by the crowd of Tokyo and has used it as an inspiration for his design. “I was in New York last month and the crowd there amused me too, maybe because I have never seen so many people at the same time while growing up. The idea of the crowd is precious to me because it’s like an icon of the modern world. I always wanted to do something with the crowd,” he said.
Nakata started his career as a motion graphic designer. Ten years ago, he saw an installation with a huge projection in New Zealand, which left him awestruck. This made him decide that he is going to do something where people enjoy videos created by their projections. He later studied programming in Holland.
However, he feels he will not make a good teacher. “I am a creative person. I can come up with great ideas but I don’t think I am good at explanations,” Nakata laughs.