A Sensory Experience to Mend a Gap
The story I was assigned was At the End of High School a Special Kind of Thank You, about Cole Phillips, a high school senior who went blind in freshman year due to complications with glaucoma, and Ruegina Keefe, the paraprofessional assigned to help him adjust to life with a disability. In the story, Phillips is giving a tribute to Keefe through the story, thanking her for being there for him at a hard time in his life. Ruegina also states that she had been going through a difficult point in her life, with a close family member struggling with addiction, and says that Cole actually brought her out of a dark place as well.
Throughout the story, the two describe their friendship as one that changed their lives, which I found interesting, given that they had met so recently, and had almost nothing in common. It’s rare to see a young teenager and an adult able to forge any sort of friendship, and my initial thoughts were all based around finding out why that relationship happened. I did research into changing relationships in the wake of major life changes and learned that in many cases, it is difficult for people undergoing major events find it difficult to feel like they can open up to who they normally open up to. Changing the way you perceive someone, or how you act around them, can change the relationship a lot, and make it difficult to interact in the same way they used to. This idea was the crutch of my thought process in my initial ideas.
Initial Ideas:
My first thought was to focus on this idea of forging new relationships through conversation, as that, through the story, and through other situations I researched, was the most important aspect in forging comfortable relationships. Focusing on conversation seemed difficult immediately, because you cannot design the mechanics of a meaningful conversation. Instead, I focused on trying to create an environment for meaningful conversations to occur in.
My idea was to create a room where participants would enter in vision obscuring headsets, for two main purposes.
- allow for anonymity and a lack of a fear of judgement in conversation
- force the participant to focus on the conversation rather than the face of the person they are speaking to.
- NOTE: The voice would be scrambled into a different one as well, keeping anonymity.
- NOTE: An idea I was also thinking about was making the face of the helmet able to display different emotions, potentially randomly, but through feedback I understood that it was pointless and far too complicated
Prototyping:
For the following class, I decided to create a model of the helmet that would be worn, to demonstrate the way vision would be blurred inside of it. I used foamcore and semi-transparent fabric to create the helmet. While doing so, though, I talked with my roommate and fellow designer Laurel, and we both agreed that the project was becoming too gimmicky and awkward because of the mask. Thus, I decided to finish the prototype just to test it.
In addition to this, I brainstormed other ways to protect anonymity without creating a foreign, robotic, or gimmicky environment, that the participant could feel comfortable in. One comparison used in class I kept coming back to was the Netflix series Love is Blind, which placed strangers behind walls to have conversations with the goal of romance. This idea of a wall, that could be somewhat see through, allowing each participant to have the freedom to move around as they normally would, and be able to see a vague outline of the other participant, making it easier to understand their body language.
Initially, the idea was that the wall would move and bend, so both participants could take up as much space as they wanted, but this became restrictive and complicated.
Brainstorming Part 2:
After pitching the wall idea, it became clear that the non-moving wall could still have an interesting level of dynamic engagement. An idea which I thought could be explored with a similar type of vision obstruction as I was trying to create with the helmet, instead using a gradient blur that would increase and decrease depending on the position of the participants, and would also focus on their shared position. This way, the screen would get less blurred as they felt more comfortable. I wanted to avoid, though, one person moving forward and compromising the comfort of the other participant.
Thinking about how much time I wanted the conversations to take, which I estimated around 15 minutes to half an hour, which is a big commitment to ask of someone. Even bigger of a commitment is asking someone to have a conversation with a complete stranger. I needed to make sure the environment was simple, comfortable, and explicit, which raised some questions:
- Should there be a human attendant?
- How should the participants be prompted for the experience?
Some other notes: The space would randomly assign each participant to another, despite each screen directly facing one another, making it harder to discern who you are talking to, considering one might see someone enter at the same time.
Final Iterations:
The final changes I made to the structure of my idea were the following:
- There would be no human attendant, all of the instructions would be presented through a concise screen
- There would be two entrances, making it harder to know for sure who you spoke to
- Each participant would have a forced waiting period, letting them get acclumated in the room
- Each room would have clay for participants to play with so they don’t get bored.
In order to prototype my experience, I wanted to actually see it in action, so I decided to create a full scale prototype, using two friends of mine who had never met before. To set up the interaction, I knew I would have to abstract the design, as I didn’t have the resources of time to build a full scale model of the abstraction.
The wall interaction was abstracted by creating a camera blocking mechanism that would involve multiple layers of obscurity, making it so each participant could change how much they showed the other participant as they felt comfortable. I built two of these mechanisms, each to fit the top of a laptop.
Once the apparatuses were built, I had both participants talk over discord in different rooms of my apartment. I also gave each participant clay and simulated the mandatory wait time that would be put in place.
The results of this and the final piece are shown in the presentation slides below.
