Giving Form to the Voices of Lay-Citizens: Monumental-IT, an Intelligent, Robotic, Civic Monument

In an increasingly digital society, it seems only apt that lay citizens be afforded interactive systems in public spaces to give form to their thoughts and desires as a collective of individual voices. While civic monuments are largely static, petrified representations of the past, sponsored by institutions and political authorities, Monumental-IT is an open-source, physical-digital (robotic) environment reconfigurable in real-time by lay citizens. We elaborate a process for generating and evaluating design alternatives for Monumental-IT, a cyber-physical artifact. Results suggest that the four distinct configurations of the robotic, multi-sensorial Monumental-IT evoke four distinct emotions in users. As well, users interacting with the prototype evaluate the design as reflecting their sentiments concerning historical events. Finally, users evaluated Monumental-IT’s design to be more apt for our increasingly digital society than conventional monument design. Monumental-IT serves as a guide for designing large-scale computational artifacts for the public domain.