The Beacon for Health & Wellness Futures: Focus on The Rail Park
Large-scale interactive public installation
- Submitting institution
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Sheffield Hallam University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 3958
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Philadelphia, USA
- Open access status
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- Month of production
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- Year of production
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- THE BEACON, with its spotlight on The Rail Park, represents a large-scale, interactive, public installation, which served as the main hub for DesignPhiladelphia 2016. R&D for THE BEACON was led by Peter Lloyd Jones at Jefferson University & Jenny Sabin Studio at Cornell. THE BEACON was commissioned & curated by Jones in his role as executive founder/director of MEDstudio@JEFF and inaugural Associate Dean of Emergent Design & Creative Technologies in Medicine. THE BEACON’s research intent includes: (a) Demonstrating how discarded urban public spaces can be re-designed to improve well-being; (b) Drawing wide attention to development of The Philadelphia Rail Park; a three mile-long developing urban greenway, and (c) Understanding how art and design can leverage science/tech to improve public health. THE BEACON humanises these futures through performance, while providing multi-generational health activities and public workshops to encourage co-discovery of solutions to help fix the broken US healthcare system. THE BEACON features robotically-knitted seamless fabric columns, drawing attention to the emerging use of smart data-textiles within healthcare. These elements were housed within a non-standard, laser-cut lattice steel shell in the form of a femur in abstract. Programmed by the dynamics of real-time human, machine and botanical datasets, THE BEACON also pronounces the debut of Big Data, Smart textiles and VR within medicine. Public engagement with a specifically-designed BEACON app programmed both THE BEACON’s neurophysiologically-relevant lighting scheme and drone weaving behaviour. Non-human data were derived by remote sensing plants on The Rail Park. These and other datasets generated additional sonic and visual outputs, transposing the public from the burgeoning Rail Park to THE BEACON’s distal site at Jefferson. The first example of large-scale, material construction by drones, the exterior of THE BEACON emerged over the course of 10d as drones deposited photoluminescent micro-cords onto THE BEACON’s surface in response to public engagement.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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