Cosplay Capstone

The Constraints

Design something that addresses a particular topic important to you
To make it interesting: be able to completely design, research, and test your idea.
The group included: just me (but – I received tremendous help from the HCI Faculty of Indiana University, Xuan Wang, Burr Walker, Matt Snyder, Binaebi Akah, Lynn Dombrowski, and the rest of the 2010 HCI cohort)
How I helped to contribute: sketching, concept generation, primary and secondary research

About the Project

Cosplay, short for costume roleplay, is a fun activity many people enjoy at anime and video game conventions. A person becomes the embodiment of their favorite character – in clothing, makeup, posture, and everything else that is the essence of that character. At these conventions, though, many of the attendees there will not interact with them, or only choose to take their picture. Through this capstone, my aim is to create something that will create meaningful and fun interactions between these two different groups of people.

So How Am I Doing It?

In order to begin trying to create interactions between these two different groups of people, I first started to look at how people have used technology to know about the people and the environments around them. I found out that these designs also missed out on the aspect of performance and the fun of cosplay, so I pressed forward to find out how to create impromptu interactions and found out that communities can be formed through the use of public technologies. I also have looked into cultural theory and found out how people use clothing throughout history as a means of empowerment and expression. I will be coupling these two approaches in the spring semester to help focus my design direction.

At the same time, I also created public experiments to help focus my design thinking. I used a cardboard cutout of Legolas (from The Lord of the Rings) and put him in an area of medium foot-traffic. I then asked people as they walked by to leave a response to this question: How would you start a conversation with Legolas? Many funny and witty responses were left, helping me to realize that popular characters can be seen as the actor who is wearing the costume. In addition, I also put up pictures of cosplayers in a common work area and left Post-It notes for people to put their thoughts about the cosplayers and what they were thinking of when they saw these people. They left responses mostly about how beautiful the costume was, or how they didn’t know the character. When asked, they said if they knew what they were looking at, they would better be able to share in the fun of the cosplayer and the experiences this character evoked. This is also a direction I am taking for the spring semester.

In the spring semester, I will be going to Genericon to better understand how people and cosplayers naturally interact. I will also be asking the attendees and some of the cosplayers their opinions on how they naturally interact and how they might want to interact with each other in the future. I will also be create a costume and cosplaying at the con myself to not only experience the fun of cosplay, but to know what it feels like to live like another persona and to have attendees look at me. In addition, I will be conducting interviews of cosplayers to learn more about how they cosplay and their attitudes about cosplay. In addition, I will be conducting focus groups of people who have attended conventions before to get their opinions about why they go to cons and how they view cosplay. I will then be able to design something that will help to make the convention experience more enjoyable for everyone who attends.

View the Capstone Research Report
View the CHI Work-In-Progress Paper (.pdf)
View the CHI Work-in-Progress Poster

Prototype Videos and Clickthrough

Capstone Photos