The Obvious Tips for Our Final

We were entrusted with some words of wisdom to think about when we are starting to do our final experience prototype and disability exercises. The first tip: you have the free will to say no to a specific disability exercise if it makes you feel uncomfortable. The second tip: don’t perform any unsafe disability exercises. The third tip: remember that different people have different social levels. In other words, there are people who aren’t very social and those who are, and factor these into the creation of these exercises.

Returning to the Last Movie Experience

Trying to draw a dragon in Spirited Away is especially tough if one hasn’t seen one, never mind trying to feed one. In order for an animator to do this well, one has to know how to draw the motions and emotions behind the movements.

Putting together these facts, and the emotions of the movie, we then analyzed the movie to find the underlying concepts and experiences waiting for us: the care and protection of the main character; how does one tame a wild beast?; the underlying allegory of the dragon and how humans should act towards each other; how to be brave; what it truly means to be brave.

We also looked at this movie from the anticipation one has when the word dragon is used. We also looked at how the Western notion of the dragon (evil, terrifying), contrasts the Eastern notion (reverence, sign of luck), all of which intertwines with the anticipation of the dragon. There is a fancy word for this: intertextuality – the blending of different texts and expectations, culminating in a shared meaning of an entity. We also looked at the emotional realism was playing behind the dragon: though it did look like it dragon, it contained the face of a dog, which humans invest certain emotions in (love, for example), which contrast the typical notion of what a dragon is. Without this emotional realism, or if this was changed to a different type of realism, these emotions and nuances would be completely different than those mentioned here. These nuances are also combined with the other metaphors of used in the dragon’s behavior and motion: the eel, snake, and gecko.

More From Buchenau and Suri

We continued our look into this influential paper. We first relooked at the definitions presented in the beginning of prototype, experience, and experience prototype. From this, we then took a look at the goals of the paper and the technique: develop experiential understanding, explore and evaluate ideas, and communicate the results to others.

The general flow of the paper was written as follows: project description, prototype creation, generation of insights, and sometimes the validation of those insights. We looked at two examples – the AED vest and the ROV operation.

For the AED project, the folks at IDEO asked: what is it like to be a patient? Hoe does it feel to unknowingly receive electrical shocks, and how does it affect life for me and others? To answer this, they wore beepers and wrote down the experience of when/where/whom they were with as it happened. They found out that it was important to get a warning of when the shock would occur, and also to let others around one with the AED know of the situation.

In the second example, they took a look at the controls of a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV). The problem they were trying to solve was the cognitive confusion of the operator. To gain insights, they first rolled up a piece of paper, held it to their eye, covered the other eye, and tried to find a PostIt note in their office. For more insights, they developed a 2 person game, where one would hold a camera, and the other would give verbal controls as to where the camera should go, all the while avoiding the obstacles in the office. They found the necessity to clearly distinguish between the camera and controller operations. They also asked someone who did this for a living, and the guy validated these insights.

From our professor’s standpoint, he felt that the technique is quite worth doing, though the writing of the paper made the insights and prototypes appear very superficial. The writing also didn’t present a “robust theory of experience and prototypes”, which was only a couple paragraphs long, as opposed to this 15 week course on experience and its design.

Drawing Upon Media Studies

Remember when we talked about media? We talked about the power of the medium and its ability to communicate some expressions well, and others not so well. Media studies does this all the time, and we can use their theory to make our experience prototypes better. We can think of our prototypes as a medium, which participates in the culture at large – don’t forget about the power of intertextuality! This allows us to combine different media to create a better and powerful experience for all the senses. We can also use the theory of 4 models of remediation to bolster the experience, and make it resonant within our body and soul.

More FAQs

We can think of this prototype as a process, whose interactions are developed over time. This draws upon the philosophy of Dewey, the whole experience vs an experience argument, the notions of doing and undergoing, the beginning, middle, and ends of an experience, the losing and reestablishing equilibrium with one’s surroundings, and utilizing all of this to do a better job at making a prototype than IDEO did. Our prototype should have uniformity in its variety of interactions, should also have an overall quality leading to an emotional quality, and help to provide some sort of closure.

Whenever we start talking to each other, we are relating experiences to each other. These are the notions of reality (life as lived), experience (life as felt), and expression (life as told). Using all of these theoretical tools will help elicit greater expressions from us as designers, and begin to get our heads thinking in the right direction. We can use interviews and experience sampling to also gain insights as we go along in our disability exercises. If there is any change in what one considers routine, then it should be expressed and written down as useful information. In order to do this, though, we have to start researching some disabilities and be as specific as possible to help the others in our group learn through these exercises, which could be of permanent or temporary disabilities.

See you after CHI 2009!

The Origins of 11

It has been mentioned many times in class to turn our efforts up to 11. The origins of this phrase are actually from an awesome movie This is Spinal Tap, which is one of the main references Guitar Hero draws upon. The movie, from YouTube, is shown below for your pleasure.