Overview

EdLab is a research, design, and development unit at Teachers College, Columbia University. EdLab engages in work that has the potential to contribute to the improvement of educational institutions and the broader evolution and reconfiguration of future educational services. The opening of the Smith Learning Theater allowed us to create unique experiences for patrons. Located on the fourth floor of the Gottesman Libraries, the theater provides an experimental environment configurable and curated to support ambitious learning, teaching, and research activities at Teachers College.

Tools used: Dante, iTunes, Photoshop, garage band, and Audacity.

Audience and Challenge

Bathroom DJ allows patrons who attend events at the Smith Learning Theater to continue to feel engaged while using the restroom. The unique challenge of this project was creating an un-intrusive experience for people using the bathroom with no budget.

Responsibilities

With my previous experience in audio editing and engineering, I led this project with my peers. I identified the capabilities of our existing sound system. I created an enhancing visitor experience for the Learning Theater visitors, edited the audio, and created documentation. Additional collaboration with the Audinate software support team was to add missing functionality. The Learning Theater has speakers throughout the space to support background music, custom program configurations, and special audio effects. Dante, a product of Audinate, controls all the speakers.

Process

For the Bathroom DJ, the audio needed to be short, engaging, and relevant to the event happening in the Learning Theater. The five bathrooms play a different audio track with a maximum length of 90 seconds. Ninety seconds would be enough time for people to be captivated but only spend a little time away from the event they were attending. The selection process for the audio consisted of finding and creating 90-second clips relevant to the event. We also wanted to avoid people feeling annoyed by an audio loop. Each bathroom was outfitted with a black-and-white image, letting people know what was playing. The visuals are in black-and-white to mirror a printed news feel while maintaining a 12-inch by 12-inch size, referencing the size of an LP album a DJ could have.

Bathroom DJ required some extra setup, which included configuring the computers to run the sound and connect with the learning theaters’ sound system. In addition to the computer setup, I created instructions and documentation, so all team members could set up the Bathroom DJ as needed. During a brainstorming session to think about an appropriate mode of interaction, we concluded that using touch screens would not be hygienic. The use of motion sensors and lights has been successful for past projects. Motion sensors were out because of their similarity to cameras, which invade people’s privacy when using the bathroom. We thought it was best to leave any camera out of the bathrooms and focus on audio because the toilets have speakers as part of the theaters’ sound system. We wanted the soundtrack to be more than music unless it was a music-related event.

We dug further into how the Dante by Audinate sounds system works. This exploratory research made me rely on the information provided by Audinate. It reached out to my network of peers (I was being scrappy by utilizing the resources available). I discovered that the speakers in the bathrooms had yet to be assigned controllers in our audio control panel in the systems console. It became clear that we needed a technician from Audinate to return to fix the control and console issues to edit the system console. 

Outcomes

We created a positive addition to the Learning Theater experience. People found the Bathroom DJ a surprise and considered the audio exciting and relevant to the events they were attending. During this project, we created a short educational experience without making people uncomfortable in what is considered a private space. We better understood a professional audio system in a corporate setting. One Bathroom DJ set included clips from presidential speeches, while another focused on digital learning.