The Three Eyed Raven — A design method for the Mixed Reality world.
Let me spare the big intro on how AR/VR is going to be relevant in the upcoming days and jump into what this is all about. We are transitioning into designing for the Virtual World at much faster a pace than before. More often than not, we come across blockades in ideation for the Virtual World. We try to go into detailed brainstorming sessions to think of innovative solutions which could align with businesses. We do come up with ideas, but more often these tend to be really similar to 2D digital screen solutions.
The three eyed raven is a Design method that we had come up with to quickly ideate for the Virtual World and to jumpstart the design process. The Three Eyed Raven is a reference to the popular Game of Thrones character who knows everything and sees everything (the reference will be detailed later on in this article).
Target audience: A group of two people, ideally one person should be a designer and the other from any profession.
Required items per group of participants: 1 A3 sheet, 1 pencil, 1 GoPro and headmount (optional), 1 audio recorder (optional).
Let’s start. The method has two sections —
- The questioning phase, and
- The designing phase.
Generally, the method is tried out with a task in mind (like cooking, repairing a leaky tap or fixing the engine of a Boeing), but as a warm-up lets try doing it for an object; (my friend Mathew would be doing the method as I narrate):
Step 1: Get the image of an object. This could be any object in the world — an apple, a rainbow, a window, or even an alphabet. Mathew selected the example of a sunglass here:
The questioning phase
Step 2: We need to imagine the object (Sunglass) in front of us (ideally you should keep an image of it open in front of you). There are two questions that you will ask yourselves now:
Question 1: What do you want to know about the object?
This could be any kind of information that you would want to know about the object. Mathew answered, “I would like to know what all colours would this be available in”. Write down your answer to the top of the A3 sheet with the pencil.
Question 2: What would you want to do with it?
The answer to this question could be what you want to do with the object or what you want to do with the information you just got from the object. Mathew said, “I would want to wear it and see myself wearing it”. Write this answer towards the bottom half of the A3 sheet.
Now you would have two sections to the sheet, where you will create your designs.
The designing phase
Step 3: Take the answer to the first question in your mind, ie. the first half of the sheet. Here you are looking for an information (Eg. Mathew wanted to know the colors). If you are presented with the image of the object in front of you, then quickly sketch how you would want this information to be presented to you.
Now we further move towards refining the design with certain guidelines:
Step 4: Refining guideline - No UI elements or Text. Redraw the first sketch without using any UI elements or text.
Step 5: Refining guideline - Think 3D. Reimagine and redraw the first sketch thinking of the object as a 3D object and with that having 3 dimensional movement.
Step 6: Refining guideline - Think situated and surface-aware. Reimagine the sketch by thinking of objects as those which will be kept on surfaces or attached to surfaces like a table or a wall. Also think of them as objects which are situated, ie. if you keep it at a place it will remain there unless it is moved. For eg. you can think of your object to be hanging from the roof and can be looked at from different angles. This could remain at the same place when someone else views it after they come to your location.
Step 7: Refining guideline - Think natural interactions and collaboration. Now re-imagine your sketch with the most natural of interactions. This could be using your hands to twist and turn on a tap or could be throwing your hands to throw a ball. Also while re-imagining this, think of what would happen if a second person would come into the space. What would this person be? What would he talk to you? What would he do to the object?
At the end of Step 7, we would have a set of designs for our first answer. This is how we apply the Three Eyed Raven method to a single answer. Note that each of these answers are a potential idea for a Virtual World solution. The designs we made would help us jumpstart into designing this Virtual World solution. Try out the same method for the second answer. Once you have done that you would have one set of ideas and one set of design solutions for the same.
Thus this method enables quick ideation and creation of design solutions for the Virtual World. As mentioned before, the method works best for a task. If you want to do a task, say, cooking, you should go through the questioning phase multiple times and get answers and keep writing it down.
After this move on to designing for each of the answers. As a final step, create a common solution for the whole lot from the list of solutions. Please note that once you are well-versed with the design’s refining guidelines, you would not want to go step by step but design in one-go considering all steps in mind.
Once people start seeing examples of implemented Virtual World solutions, their designs would be more practical and implementable. Its optional to show them some existing interfaces and do a second round of designing.
The exercise could also be done with a head-mount GoPro on one of the participants, who go on and observe the world as he/she sees it and perform tasks while recording the video. The participant would keep asking the know and do question at each step and would record their answers through the audio recorder. Every time they need an information, the other participant in the group will provide the information. The task is thus performed and all actions and answers are recorded. The participants can then use the video and audio to go help them in the designing phase.
Finally, when a person has done the exercise multiple times, he/she becomes the Three Eyed Raven. The Three Eyed Raven is a person who would have an imaginary Augmented Reality headset on him/her always and will have all the information in the world in their mind. They see and know everything. Any information that they want to know will be available to them. They go near an elevator and without the elevator opening, they would visualise how many people are there in the elevator (and how the information would be presented to them). When they see an empty plate in a restaurant, they start visualising how the plate would be if it is full and keep swapping different menu items. When they see a ball on the ground, they visualise a goalpost and do what they want to do with the ball- kick it, throw it etc. They are the creatives of the future, they keep asking what they want to know or do about anything or any task. It becomes a lifestyle for them.
Go crazy!
