Meeting 4.6.2016 — Thinking about Context, Audience, Medium
We met today to talk about the application of our physical deliverable. After talking to Stacie during lunch, we realized that having an imaginary physical final product would not be as immersive as a simple yet well-communicating physical product. Some ideas that came to our mind were:
- A space with kid tables and chair, crayons and Legos for people to play with.
- Interactive wall where people could write their forgotten passions and things they just couldn’t do because of school work and their daily life as a student.
- A artifact as an result of the information we have collected through mediums such as the above. This could be displayed throughout the displays around campus and people could have a chance to see and think about it.
Since the time limit is pretty short on this project, we are planning to put aside the video(not enough time to interview many people) and work on something that can incite action. We thought about a website where there is a single prompt and the whole website is a white wall where you can click and write something related to the prompt. The users input will be completely anonymous and it will stay there for other people to see. When the wall gets filled, it will automatically expand its canvas to the side.
We also talked about how we could work when Tiffany is at an event for the whole weekend starting from Friday. Noah and I took the responsibility to reach out to Tiffany with questions while we would be working as a group of two.
I am looking forward to the class meeting tomorrow to see examples of visual vocabularies and how they can help us to create a more coherent system about “the act of learning”.
Meeting 4.7.2016 — Thinking about the System and the Title
During class we started by making some of our ideas physical. Tiffany found the website that let you create your sub-link to have your own wall of ideas. www.yourworldoftext.com/~learnagain was our initial test site to see how we could work around the tools that were given to us. We discovered that the website had admin options and we could have permanent information.
We also worked on some simple iterations of what the stickers could look like and are thinking about playing with the relation of pink and blue that could work well. At that moment we were playing with phrases such as “learnagain”,”Love your work” we did not push the designs much forward as it was just an exploratory phase.
Right after this, Stacie came to our desk and helped us out to figure out the “why” of this project. It was true that we were helping people to reach out and remember things they did before and stopped doing now, but where would that take them and what did we want them to think about? We realized that we want to explore into what actually should/may happen afterwards and thinking about the “call to action” that will be happening.We want the people to relate the things they did on that table to the work they are doing right now and understand how the things they learnt guided them through their life towards the thing they want to do.
So we went towards thinking about using the digital medium as an reflection about what they did with the physical medium. So after people play around with legos, playdoh and crayons, we would prompt them to the website to write about their actions within the physical medium relates to their work. So they understand that the things they did in the past, when they learnt them first adds up to where they are right now.
We could not decide on a final title/catch to use throughout the mediums so we will be meeting this weekend with Noah to further on explore our visual vocabulary and think about different titles.
Meeting 4.18.2016 — Preparing the Presentation
Right after a beautiful break, we spent our afternoon planning the presentation.
Since we constantly kept in touch with together to clarify some points about our topic, we had little to change while making the presentation. One thing that we realized was that — the project was happening in our mind and in our talk, but we had done little about visualizing the a way to communicate our ideas to other people. For example, we ended up putting stock images of the plastic tables and legos as a representation of the spatial element of our system.
Most of the comments we received afterwards revolved around good color and consistent style, but one thing was that they thought they heard a 40 year-old person talking but the poster were more lively, the inconsistency of the voice vs. visual forced us to think more and figure out a better way to phrase our wording.
Meeting 4.20.2016 —Changing some major things
After all reading all the critique as a group, we decided that our title was keeping us back. We also had a long talk with Andrew and figured out that we also had to decide whether our system should be linear or should be approachable from any aspect without prior knowledge.
We spent a good 2 hours trying to come up with a new way to phrase our work. In the end, we decided that the learning was something we wanted people to value more after they were in our system so we named our system Thinkback — Lookforward. The two parts would mainly be the two states were the user has to understand what they wanted in their childhood and after understanding, can relate his reason to be here as a step towards future for his aspirations.
The reason why we ditched the learnagain theme was that the name was too forceful about the act of learning and sounded more like a 40-year old person’s student activity project. We wanted to focus more on the way this could be acceptable by people on our campus.
To implement thinkback and learnagain, we did not change our print pieces that much. But it gave us a beautiful chance to juxtapose and mirror things that we had. We played around with colors and shapes that would make more sense with the two parts of our project and called it a day.
