Red Paper Heart

Holding the door for someone, recommending a book, letting someone ahead of you in line–these are little things that people do for each other. Our friends at Bombas asked us to create a piece that responded to small everyday acts of human kindness. Bombas created an online campaign that allowed users to submit deeds to inspire people this holiday season. We created a moving physical sculpture that brought this campaign to life. The Good Deed Machine lived in the window of the Gap store at 54th and 5th for 2 weeks. Passers by could place their hand on the glass and watch the gears and pistons of the machine startup. The activity of the machine would then produce a good deed, written by online users, for them to carry out this Holiday. The end result was a playful and kinetic way to visualize the flow of goodwill during the Holidays. The machine was created with a combination of classic automata techniques in combination with arduino, stepper motors, and camera tracking. A central cinder framework ran the installation and coordinated the movements of all the components.