Communication Studio — Project 2
Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design in Fall 2021
Sep 28
What have you identified as important pieces of information relative to your topic? Include sketches where warranted.
The topic I am tasked with is Air Purifier which many of us use every day but have no chance to think about the detailed mechanism of how it really works. I believe that the most important information to explain its functionality is the role of the fan and filter to purify air pollution. Particularly, the quality of filters affects air purification.
There are two types of air purifiers, one is the active purifier and the other is the passive purifier. The active purifier actively diffuses purification and sterilization into the air. On the other hand, the passive purifier draws air into the machine by using a fan.
Sep 30
What narrative sequences are you exploring in communicating important information about your topic clearly and effectively? Explain their structure and merit through text and images.
In order to hook the audience, I would like to use personification for Storytelling. The main actor of my narrative sequence could be particles. I am considering starting from the point of view of a particle in the air and showing the path it will go through to be filtered.
It starts with the daily life story—you enter the room and feel the air quality is bad so turn on the air purifier questioning how the machine can filter air pollutants. By comparing two types of air purifiers, I would like to further explain each characteristic and downsides.
Oct 5
Which narrative structure do you plan to employ and why? (What did you learn from teaching others about your topic?) How might you leverage channels of information to aid understanding in a compelling and meaningful manner?
During the class, I could get a lot of meaningful feedback about my draft storyboard from others by conducting speed dating. Most of the feedback was about the active purifier since the passive purifier is relatively familiar to the audience. I need to add more explanation about how the purification factor that the active purifier releases affects pollutants in the air. Also, I might add more cuts explaining the different types of filters.
While I’m showing the storyboard to others, I realized that some transition and narration script was not smooth. Reflecting form this, I revised some narration more naturally and add transitions between some scenes.
One of the positive pieces of feedback I’ve got was the way characterizing actors in my story. I think this could be a good approach to explain something unfamiliar and complicated concept to the audience. I will keep this style to help users to follow my story.
Oct 7
What visual styles might you leverage to communicate important information about your topic to others? What approaches are feasible and appropriate, given the length of this project?
Since the main actors in my video will be particles that are mostly round-shaped, I want to keep the drawing style simple. I will mainly use a black line of doodling and several different colors on the particles to give them characteristics. In this way, the audience will identify which are the bad particles—bacterias, dust, odor, etc versus good particles.
To add efficient motion, I am planning to use “Turbulent Displace” in Adobe After Effect. This will allow my characters to look wiggly. Above all, I expect this effect will save my time so that I can focus on refining the narration and transition between different scenes.
Oct 14
What steps do you plan to take to refine/improve your design approach based on the feedback you received from the review session?
From the feedback my teammates gave me, I will refine some of the sequences to be more elaborative. For instance, in the first scene of explaining the passive air purifier, I got feedback that it is hard to understand the fan is actually in the machine or not. Another point that I can work on is the visual metaphor of filters. Originally I plan to draw filters as a door so that some of the particles can go through and others cannot. However, I would better change it to the web or punched wall to describe the function of filters which is catching the particles.
Oct 19
What are you learning from the making of the video that is informing the actions you’re taking?
As I’m putting the frames and sound at the same timeline in After Effect and see how it looks and sounds like, it’s becoming more clear what part I should go deeper into and what part I should omit. This cannot be discovered while I’m just stuck into the storyboard. Some transitions looked unnatural and need to be modified. Also, there was some visual language such as the color and size of the particles and that should be changed to help better understanding. I will work on these points for this week.
Oct 21
What steps do you plan to take to refine/improve your video based on the feedback you received from the review session? What areas require attention/improvement to communicate effectively?
After another iteration and feedback from other students, I found out that my video needs more frames between the keyframes that can explain the transition and what is happening. Since I drew all of the keyframes and animated them, currently I’m focusing on what frames are needed additionally to smooth the video.
Also, I’ve some interesting feedback that suggests using sound effects with a mouth. I think it would work because those sorts of funny sounds could go well with my wiggling drawing style. The below is the reference of using interesting sounds made by a mouth.
Oct 26
What are you learning from refining your video that is informing your fine-tuning?
The most helpful thing to refine my video was to show it to a new person who had never heard of this project and get feedback. Since this audience has no information about the subject or script of my video, I was able to fix that part if the one felt that the video is incomprehensible. I often showed the video and asked for feedback from my peers but also to people outside the design department.
In this process, I realized that the part of explaining how the filters work needs to be refined with more detailed frames.
Also, I’m challenged to visualize the most important line to convey to the audience. This line is the main sentence to describe how the active air purifier works. Describing the passive air purifier was comparatively easy to visualize since it has a clear visual form to explain the process which was the layers of filters. Unlike the passive purifier, the mechanism of the active air purifier sounds more complicated and hard to understand with just one line mentioning ions and oxidization. To solve this problem, I am planning to add a couple of sentences to help the audience understand the process and definition of oxidization.
Essentially this means that the purifier produces ions that oxidize pollutants. Negatively charged ions attract positively charged pollution particles, effectively killing them off or inactivating them.
To explain the concept of oxidization, I re-write the line as above. I am planning to visualize this line with an ion character that has a ‘-’ symbol on its body and pollutants characters with ‘+’ symbols.
Nov 2
What are your key takeaways from the second project? How might you apply what you learned in the future?
I learned how to make storyboards and narratives considering the audience who are not familiar with the topic. I believe this is one of the most important skill sets for UX designers since those skills can be applied to UX writing and user scenario. As UX designers, we are easily using words that are not users centered since we are using those words so often among designers. Using easy words for users seems basic and easy but it is not.
