Hello! My name is Anmol. I will soon be graduating from the Master of HCI + Design program at the University of Washington, Seattle. I have previously worked as a design researcher in fields such as healthcare, education, AI, VR (HTC Creative Labs) and most recently journalism (The Seattle Times). I enjoy exploring new forms of technology and the ways in which one can use these forms of technology to design meaningful products & services that can satiate both explicit and tacit human needs. Just some time back, I got the wonderful opportunity of hearing Wilmot Li speak at the Design Use Build (DUB) seminar. Wilmot (Wil) Li is a Principal Scientist at Adobe Research. Wil’s research lies at the intersection of computer graphics and human-computer interaction, and in recent years, he has focused on performance-based 2D animation and design tools for fabrication.
I was extremely inspired from his talk and was enthused to share this idea I had in which Adobe Character Animator could possibly help community health workers (ASHA workers) in remote parts of India connect better with local families and help them realize the value of investing in healthcare. Prior to joining the MHCI + D program in Seattle, I was incubated for my startup -‘Kahinee’. ‘Kahinee’ (a storyteller) focussed on educating women in rural parts of India about maternal healthcare issues using local folk plays and music. I was a UX Researcher on my team and a significant part of my job was to use methods such as semi-structured interviewing, focus groups and ethnographic research to better understand the problems that women, community health workers and doctors in the rural parts of India seem to face. Two problems that they all seem to agree on were a) Women are not allowed to take their own healthcare decisions because of societal pressure b) Families would not allow them to visit the PHCs (Public health centers) even when they suffer from health issues that require immediate medical attention. Mothers-in-law and husbands would instead force them to go to the local witch doctor (commonly known as the ‘Bhuva’) because of superstitious beliefs that are still prevalent in their local communities.
I am sure that Wil’s wonderful talk on performance based 2D animation and helping community health workers in remote parts of India might understandably seem like two extremely disjointed ideas to you at this point! :) Therefore, I will first begin by sharing what I learnt from Wil’s talk and then discuss how Adobe’s concept could be used to help the community health workers in India connect better with families. Wil began by beautifully explaining how 2D animation has been an extremely effective storytelling medium across many domains such as entertainment and education. He also explained how it used to be extremely tedious for animators before as they would have to manually draw every frame (almost like a flipbook!) or manually specify keyframes and motion curves. Thus, animation never felt approachable to the average user. The Adobe Character Animator instead now allows animators to have direct real time control over their digital characters via performance. Wil discussed key concepts such as ‘Raw motion capture’, ‘Discrete input’ and ‘Triggering Interfaces’. He plotted each of these approaches on a graph of ‘ease of use’ v/s. ‘flexibility’.
The above graph is from Wil’s presentation. He explained using this graph that using ‘Discrete Inputs’ such as Keyboard, MiDI and Touch might offer greater flexibility to the animator but at the same time might also significantly make the process seem complicated and intimidating to the average user. The same also applies to using joystick, gamepad and trackball for designing animation. He also showed some examples of using ‘Triggering Interfaces’ (as shown in the diagram given below). However, that also requires the animator to be well versed with using certain predefined trigger movements while also simultaneously reading out her character’s lines. Wil explained that ‘Raw Motion Capture’ on the other hand just uses the animator’s facial expressions and body movements. This method might offer lesser flexibility (e.g. make your character turn into a butterfly or make your character burst) but is significantly easier to use and makes animation seem more approachable to the average user.
He also explained how ‘Lip Sync’ is a challenge currently and their team is working on incorporating machine learning based solutions to address this challenge. The Adobe Blog throws further light on the same issue in their article-‘Animation Evolution: From Paper to Digital to 3D to Live Stream’. They explain that their products use Adobe Sensei, which is a machine learning and artificial intelligence capability that has been integrated into many Adobe products such as the Character Animator. Adobe Sensei listens to a voice and automatically picks the right mouth shapes in real time to animate the character. The product listens for and analyzes 66 different phonemes (the different sounds that distinguish one word from another) and figures out which mouth shape to replicate.
Now, let’s take a short trip to India! India has always had a rich tradition of puppeteering. ‘Kathputli’ (a form of traditional Indian puppetry) art tradition is more than thousand years old. One can find it frequently being mentioned in Rajasthani folk tales and folk music. ‘Kathputli’ gave India the credit of being one of the first countries to have invented traditional puppetry. Tribes of Rajasthan have been performing this art from the ancient times and it has become an eternal part of Rajasthani culture and tradition. No village fair, no religious festival and no social gathering can be complete without the Kathputlis. Tradition of Kathputli is based on folk tales and stories. India’s capital New Delhi also has an area known as ‘Kathputli Colony’, where puppeteers, magicians, acrobats, dancers and musicians and other groups have settled since half a century. If you visit villages (specially villages in Rajasthan!) then you might often come across families sitting together and watching a ‘Kathputli’ show in the evening while animatedly discussing the story being performed. The puppeteers dress their puppets up in traditional Rajasthani costumes and have them enact popular stories to convey messages of social good.
If we add the above mentioned concepts together then I see the birth of a very interesting and effective approach for educating local communities about healthcare issues. I believe that giving community health workers (ASHA workers) the power of Adobe Character Animator to design their own puppets and animate them using simple performances to talk about important health issues using relatable characters could prove to be extremely effective. They would be able to strike a chord with these same families who seem to be enjoying puppetry since years now and help them learn about the importance of healthcare without coming across as forceful or inappropriate. I also strongly feel that such live animation tools could also allow the health workers and educators to talk openly about a variety of sensitive topics through relatable and extremely approachable characters. There are certain health topics that are often considered to be taboo in villages because of which the health workers do not feel comfortable discussing them with families. This tool could potentially help them solve that issue. This tool could help educators and health workers design compelling as well as engaging content that the whole family would like to watch together.
However, one obstacle that I see currently is that ‘Adobe Sensei’ might not work in this scenario. Multiple languages & dialects are spoken in the rural parts of India. Thus, Adobe Sensei might not be able to accurately distinguish between the different phonemes (the different sounds that distinguish one word from another) of these spoken languages and dialects. We might have to collect these language corpuses and train ‘Adobe Sensei’ using the same.
I would like to conclude with this rough but happy sketch! I really hope with all my heart that ASHAs actually get to use Adobe Character Animator one day. I strongly feel that such tools have immense potential and can really change the way we as a community perceive health education and even education as a whole! :)
References
https://theblog.adobe.com/animation-evolution-paper-digital-3d-live-stream/
https://theblog.adobe.com/unique-and-powerful-animation-features-added-to-character-animator-cc/
Brandon, James R.; Martin Banham (1997). The Cambridge guide to Asian theatre. Cambridge University Press. Brandon, p. 93
Ghosh, Sampa; Utpal Kumar Banerjee (2006). Indian puppets. Abhinav Publications. (Ghosh, p. 75)
Rajasthan, by Anymique Choy, Tarangi Singh , pg 35.
“History of Kathputli”.
TravelForYou Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu0Ao0PHMtQ
