In the summer of 2020, Creative Informatics hired 5 fabulous interns, who were all masters students in Design Informatics at University of Edinburgh, to support our ongoing research.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be showcasing the results of these projects, starting with Flow Ctrl, an app for managing the flow of visitors through the Talbot Rice Gallery during Covid-19 restrictions.

Flow Ctrl

Supervisor(s): Chris Speed, Evan Morgan, Mark Kobine

Intern(s): Qiubin Wu and Ziying Li

This project set out to create a digital tool for assisting the Talbot Rice Gallery (TRG) with managing the flow of visitors through their gallery spaces, whilst ensuring visitor safety during the pandemic. During a series of remote workshops and consultations with the TRG, the project team settled upon the idea of a simple digital traffic light system. Initial wireframe prototypes were created by the interns, allowing the team to consider various aspects of the user experience and interface design. These wireframes were then converted into a working web-app prototype.

For each gallery space, the web app provides a control interface and a signalling interface. The control interface enables TRG staff to manually count the number of visitors in the space, and to specify whether visitors can enter the space. This information is synchronised with the signalling interface, which is intended to be displayed on a screen at the entrance to the space. This new system gives TRG a much more accurate visitor count than their existing system and gives them a finer granularity of visitor data in terms of number of visitors in each space, when and for how long.

The Flow Ctrl app is available and free to use, sign up to use the app in your venue now.

If you have any questions about this project, please contact the Creative Informatics team at creativeinformatics@ed.ac.uk.