Field of Leaves: An Interactive Installation Sprouting Leaves Out of Public Money

Field of Leaves is an interactive installation that depicts public contracts held in Portugal and their distribution over its five regions and two autonomous regions. The installation is the second iteration of Money Leaves Portugal‘s work.

Our installation further explores the composition of the leaves, and adds a new medium of information acquisition through users’ interaction. With this new layer, we intend to advocate the importance and advantages of aesthetics in an audience’s-first engagement and how an embodied interaction mechanism can increase the user’s curiosity and promote more lasting explorations.

Our design expansion applied the metaphor of berries, represented by a composition of small circles as the number of contracts present in a given leaf, symbolizing the sprouting fruit resulting from the investments made (Figure X)

**Figure 1**

Berry composition. The color of the central circle represents the type of contract and the size its value. The size of the spiral surrounding the circles represents the duration of the contract in which its color changes upon reaching the indicated time interval

Furthermore, with the added dimension of interaction, this information can be further presented to the user in a textual, detailed form, where extra statistics about the given region are provided (Figure Y).

**Figure 2**
The two possible Region Details pop-ups. One single pop-up window for sensors responsible for two regions (left) and two pop-up windows for sensors responsible for one region (right).

The installation has two states: a rest mode and an active mode, one when there are no participants interacting with the visualization, and another when one or more participants are interacting with the visualization, respectively. When in rest mode, the visualization shows the contracts for the entire country, aggregated by sector of activity, in one single module (Figure 3).

**Figure 3**
Screenshot of the visualization in Portugal Mode. Leaves distributed by the 12 sectors of activity..

The transition from rest mode to active mode takes place when at least one participant approaches the installation. When this happens, the visualization is updated, presenting the same contracts aggregated in rest mode, but now distributed across the regions of Portugal where they were held (Figure 4).

**Figure 4**
Screenshot of the visualization in Region Mode. Leaves distributed by the 7 regions.

External links

See more about the upcoming presentation on the website of SIGGRAPH 2022

Publication

P. Silva, D. Lopes, P. Martins, and P. Machado, “Field of Leaves: An Interactive Installation Sprouting Leaves Out of Public Money,” Proc. ACM Comput. Graph. Interact. Tech., vol. 5, iss. 4, 2022.
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