Design a mixed-reality experience that mimics the studio advantages/interactions afforded to those in person.
Gathering Research
Reading Material Main Takeaways:
- Combine physical bodystorming with acting to ideate. Storyboarding serves different purposes at various levels of fidelity.
- Designing for the “average” means designing for nobody. Personas risk molding to mental stereotypes the more you define them.
- Persona spectrums account for variable situations, increasing inclusivity in your designs. Aim to capture specific motivations/conditions across a broad range of contexts.
I surveyed my classmates about the communal 2023 Design Class discord server in order to understand what they derive from virtual experiences as a potential substitute for in-person studio time.
A general consensus was that discord allowed for a casual space with various uses. Users could come and go as they liked, dropping in to check on each other and updating their pages at their own pace.
Moving forward, I’d like to aim for this aspect (socializing) for the virtual studio experience.
Building Personas
I organized my spectrum of personas according to the various social contexts and needs as far as interaction and collaboration goes. Given the variety of our social situations, it makes sense to accommodate varying levels of introversion/extroversion and student uses for the studio environment.
Storyboarding
Ideally, people would be able to skip around and visit their colleague’s desks in the app, projecting their garden onto their own desk in AR.
Perhaps the plants wouldn’t need to be realistic- users could water alien plants and glowing mushrooms?
The intended concept is to make a low-profile, unobstrusive “song” generated through mic feedback as people work at their desks to establish a feeling of companionship for remote people. Perhaps the unique windchime can be generated from the color palette/detected objects of the AR scan?
Prototyping
Still working out the kinks for a proposed planter pot in AR. One thing that’s particularly frustrating is that I can’t get an item to grow from 0% scale to 100%, I need to start it shrunken and scale it up to 200%. This makes the plant growing animation hard to keep in proportion.
Prototyping II
Following first crit, I was advised to push the “garden” concept further by adding one more element. Remotely working people are missing a certain social aspect- how can I make up for that through rewarding interactions in the garden?
The thing people enjoyed most about the communal discord was the free ability to connect with remote people at their own pace. Users can check in as they please, instead of being bombarded with constant updates and alerts like in other apps. There is less pressure to immediately respond to a ping. This unique kind of slowed-down casual space is something I want to emulate in the garden.
There are already so many social media apps- I don’t want to potentially add to a list of distracting media preventing students from focusing. If I can communicate the garden idea as being on a more elastic time frame- maybe you check it once a week- then it could stand out more without competing for time and attention.
“Snail Mail”
I want to introduce a messaging system component to the remote studio interaction experience. This component will be defined by 3 important ideas:
- Sustained value: I want to distinguish this experience from other forms of social media by creating more long-lasting value in the messages sent back and forth.
- Slowed down time: I want to keep this experience a go-at-your-own-pace kind of thing. There can’t be any incentive to constantly check for notifications, or feel pressured to stay on top of the app.
- Cutesy theme: As far as visual design, I want to keep this looking lo-fi and calm. The video game Animal Crossing comes to mind.
With Snail Mail, users can send letters to their friends, which arrive at their desks after a significant time delay (3 days?). Letters are archived by date and time, and can be referenced at any time. Ideally, the time delay adds more significance to the kind of message sent by encouraging users to consider it more like a hand-written letter than an instant text. Users would not feel pressured to keep up with letters and could exchange conversation at a slower pace. When visiting friend’s gardens, users could see their friend’s snail in transit and know that messages are being sent out.
Reexamining Personas
I went back and fleshed out the personas according to interests, personalities, workspaces, etc. to get a better sense of how these people might interact amongst each other and build a studio culture. I’m primarily considering these personas in terms of the workspaces they might curate and share with each other.
Video Storyboard
Looking forward, I can assume my video is going to rely on 3D renders for the plants and snail, and 2D UI animations for the AR interface. Things I may include in the video if time allows:
- “Snail Mail returning” sequence
- More detailed sample persona profiles
- “Swiping through plants” sequence
Final Video
Self-reflection: How were the skills you developed in the first project similar and/or different from the second project? What is your understanding of the role of an Environments designer?
This project required a similar approach in the early concepting stage. I continued to work on developing moodboards, storyboards, and research. Instead of parti diagrams, I developed persona spectrums. But other than that, the concepting skills remained pretty much the same. I used this opportunity to create some more high fidelity visualizations that I didn’t get to attempt in the first project.
Environments design extends towards building a space around the user, too. Desk space and a working environment go hand in hand- for a social context, my role also includes considering how users feel about interacting with other users.
