The Interactive Globe is a critical design project about privacy in the 21st century.

Because we wanted to come up with a concept that was about something that’s happening at the moment we ended up with the topic privacy and security cameras. We had a couple multiple ideas that involved using livestreams from all over the world being picked up from all sorts of different cameras. You can find these on multiple websites, for example http://www.insecam.org. These streams come from cameras that hang in the street, bars and stores but can also involve the view inside of someone’s house when they forget to change the password of their security camera.

The fact that you travel around the world by simply looking at these livestreams became the basis of our project. The next thing that we needed to figure out was how it was gonna be interesting, and interactive. The final concept was to have multiple screens with a livestream from all over the world, in different situations. A globe would function as the controller as we could put multiple buttons on it that would trigger different livestreams.

We ended up with a big balloon that had capacitive sensors in the shape of eyes on it. These all were linked to a different livestream that would be projected on the wall when one of the sensors was being covered. The sensors worked separately, so multiple people could hold sensors so that more livestreams would be visible. There was one different sensor, which was linked to livestreams from the room where the balloon was located. When this sensor was pressed the viewers would be looking at themselves, realising that they’re being watched too. This sensor also shows a code-file that seems to include the names that the viewer’s phones have, including all the wi-fi networks that they’ve been logged in to.