The most rewarding part of this whole process was not only seeing our vision come to life but the way people responded to the piece. What really completed the piece was the sound. We combined nature sounds with noises we associate with technology interaction such as mouse clicks and notification tones. And the button controls also had a sad and happy sound feedback that the  audience really enjoyed.

Some interesting observations we had:

• “I feel like I could just sit here and watch there is a calming and soothing effect”
• The sound added to the cues we were trying to convey through the piece.
• Many people were able to link digital content, artificial life and machine to the interaction as well as it being a commentary to nature which made us very happy.
• We initially intended the buttons to be like and dislike. But the dislike was not very obvious. Someone took it as play button but it actually helped them relate the piece to social media.
• The one major point to note was that the buttons were not obvious to the audience that those were interactive pieces, which is crucial since it is the point of entry to the piece. We need to work more on the buttons to make it seems like they are objects to press. Maybe have them pop out more or lit up like inviting round buttons. However, when people interacted with the buttons they noted there was satisfying feeling to the sound and feel. 
• Viewers wanted to map the buttons to the flowers and keep trying to find new surprises in the interactive experience. One such surprise was the camera and how some of the visuals reacted to the viewers. 

Suggestions and discussion:

• LadyK pointed out that there is “Something machine like in this piece….but some softness there too.” How can we  find a balance between the two – let it speak on its own?  This made me think about how adding more elements to the social media aspect can help, or making the space bigger yet keeping the subtlety to the movements of the natural elements.
• “There is this feeling that it wants to jump out of the wall the fixed plane and surround us.” That was what we initially wanted – to make it as an immersive experience. But I feel like the ambience created a different effect which was soothing to witness by many people together. Everyone still had this urge to see more, to be encapsulated and have a bigger space to play on. 
• People were very intrigued by the text and what the story it was trying to tell. The only problem was the button bar was casting a shadow over the text and made it hard to read. So some suggestion was to highlight it better and put it above the image rather than below. Even have a separate LCD screen for the text, which could be cool. 
• The effect of constantly wanting to push the button and not really seeing the whole thing. Its the effect of social media and rapid content generating demand we were trying to demonstrate through the piece.
• I liked hearing about the emotions it evoked in viewers, especially the sound cues. It made them feel like they were “doing something right” with the happy noise from the like button. I think there could be more to explore there also with the visuals, make the content seem more personal so that viewers don’t just focus on pressing the buttons.
• The other interesting suggestion was the idea of projecting light or visuals onto the buttons and adding more complexity to the interactions. As people keep playing or interacting more and more, the natural elements gradually fade away or “die” in some sense.

Lastly, I want to end on the note that this wouldn’t have been possible without my teammate Fuguo who had to unfortunately go through the frustrations of physical computing troubleshooting for the first time under high stress. But her patience and perseverance helped us glue the piece together. I also want to thank LadyK for guiding us through this and the entire semester. I am incredibly happy with all that I have learned and achieved with her help and being inspired by my fellow, very creative classmates.