Week 7 - Tuesday

Going back to uni today was really hard. I still feel so lost with my brief and really worried about how I'm going to move forward with it.
Over the break I really struggled trying to manage my boyfriend's illness and spent most of the first week looking after him, then I myself got run down and have been sick during the second week and still am which has caused me to not give enough time to my project.

My friends are working on a different brief and also struggling to generate fresh ideas. They could see the stress I was under and we came up with the idea to move forward together as a group of 3 in order to get a fresh take on a brief and to support each other.

Class started with a lecture in the Pit and we then moved up into studio to present our homework from over the break as a kind of exchange moment. I really enjoyed the way this was done - we got into groups of 3/4 and presented our findings, then picked our best one and combined with another group to present it, and then the best one from this group went forwarded and presented to the "uber group". After this we moved into studio time for the last hour which was a good chance for us to look at how we were going to move forward as a new group.

Looking at the 2 briefs we decided to continue with the one they had been working on which was called "Sh!t @ social interaction". I downloaded the brief and had a look over it and they told me the avenues of research that they had looked into.

What I gathered is that they are looking at young working professionals who aren't interacting socially outside of their 8-5 work hours, and that our task was to encourage them to connect in order to improve their well being.
The girls have looked into things such as friendable and tinder social but are thinking because these types of apps already exist we need to do something different that might actually make more of an impact and not be "creepy".
Reading over the brief again I pulled out that we need to break their routine of work/home being their only places of being, and how do we motivate them to connect - teach them why it's important, make it the norm.

We spent most of our time going over where they had got to and thinking about how we could move forward especially as we needed to get our idea and prototype it all in time for interim presentation next week. Because the brief was so new to me we decided it would be best to go away and ideate and then come back and make some strong decisions on Friday.

We did make the decision to make a new group combined blog, the link for which is:
http://sasi-sakala.blogspot.co.nz/

Break - homework

Over the break we were asked to present research on
- An individual who is in a specific situation regarding their Wellbeing . . or
- A human made (manufactured or social, etc) experience that addresses a persons Wellbeing

I found this really interesting article on Shallow Interaction Design (something I'd never heard of before) but found really interesting so decided to present this when we return.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/03/getting-disconnected-shallow-interaction-design-deeper-human-experiences/

I prepared 3 slides as per the instructions and wrote myself some notes as to what I was talking about on each slide:

 

I looked at improving wellbeing in terms of connection after being inspired by the article Getting (dis)Connected: Shallow Interaction Design for Deeper Human Experiences by Jes Koepfler & Kieran Evans. It contained a great introduction to the idea of Immersive vs. Shallow Interaction Design.

Immersive Interaction Design promotes deeper engagement between the human and the technological interface and immerses you in the technology rather than encourage you to connect with others in real life. Immersive design encourages users to stay in the application by creating nested content (image).

Shallow Interaction Design on the other hand promotes surface level interactions with technology to minimize distraction. It focuses on getting technology out of the way to support social interaction by keeping the experience and content shallow, meaning the content always originates from a single source point.

The design task that they demonstrated this concept with was their task to create a digital tool that supports a face-to-face roleplaying game for audiences 14 and over around disaster resilience and emergency response. The important thing for this brief was that in order to combine digital and human interactions they recognised that they needed to harness shallow interaction design. As ideas developed and the technological aspects became greater, it was important to reflect on their decisions, and they realised that in a real disaster situation technology and communications are often first to break down so they needed to keep iterating to a point where the technology component was only involved when absolutely necessary, and the iterations for this are still happening.

What I acknowledged could be useful for me to take forward was to keep in mind whether technology benefits the message. This is especially critical in my brief where I am dealing with elderly people. I also took on board the importance of continuing to reflect on and iterate ideas and methods. I compiled a neat list for when to consider Immersive Interaction Design and when to consider Shallow Interaction Design. Immersive Interaction Design is most useful when the primary goal is to connect people with technology, for social experiences that are designed to happen online, and for content heavy experiences. Shallow Interaction Design is more useful when the primary goal is human interaction, for social experiences designed to happen in person, and for content-light experiences.

Break - noticing my environment!

I was walking down a street in Island Bay today and noticed this sign:

It made me think about my idea for the elderly safe zones and how this would have to comply with current government laws/road signs etc.

I had never noticed this sign before but it was really relevant to my idea!