Post-Crit Analysis for CMU Tour Augmentation
After the first crit of our way to augment the CMU Tour, I walked away with a lot of things to think about. I’ll list some of them below and briefly talk about how I plan on tackling them.
Content vs Medium
This was perhaps the biggest take away for me from the crit. for me, I feel like the biggest problem with the current general tour is in its content. Its not that the content is bad or untrue or anything like that, its just that it feels the same as almost every other college because for the most part very college want to market the same things to every student who wants to visits. like I said earlier, this isn't in any way a bad thing, but when its a students 3rd or 4th college tour, that type of language starts to become meaningless. Now here’s the even bigger problem, its pretty easy to assume that any hypothetical client that would want a designer to work on this project to focus on the delivery of the content rather than the content itself. This is, of course, very understandable, after all the content of the tour has been created to paint a very specific image of the college. Because of this, I need to start shifting my thinking to the medium of the content rather than the content itself. This is definitely going to be a big challenge for me because at the current moment it definitely feels like I’m trying to cover a giant hole in the wall with only wall paper, but that’s just the way it goes. having to focus on delivery over content is something that is a very realistic scenario and I need to learn how to get my head in the right space to think about it. That isn't to say I wont try to nudge the content one way or the other through the delivery though. We will see how it goes.
What role does the physical environment play in the experience?
This was a more minor topic, though still very important. The experience we are hypothetically developing is supposed to augment the current experience and specifically not be something for students who can’t visit in person. With this in mind, we have to be very careful about not removing the importance of physically being on campus from CMU, which is a very easy trap to fall into if you experience exists almost entirely in the digital realm.
Use of AR
my feelings on Augmented Reality are… mixed… to say the least. Its not that I don’t see any potential in the technology or that i’m technophobe or something like that (I’m actually quite the opposite) I just think it needs to be very carefully and thoughtfully implemented in order to add value. Its really easy to just say “lets throw in AR videos at each stop on the tour so that students can actually see what life on campus is really like at any time.” but I feel very unsure about the amount of value that would add. Well, actually I’m sure it would add a decent amount of value to the experience, its just that it adds value in a way that I think you need to be very cautious about. I’m probably not making all that much sense right now, but that’s OK, Iwill likely cover the topic in more depth in a later post.
For now that’s all. Cya.