10.07 // Poster share out + Immersion
Class today was driven mostly by the students, taking us through their initial posters for their semester project as well as a student lab going through the concept of immersion.
Last week the students finalized their groups for the semester project and began to discuss the challenges that they would like to research in the context of the CMU campus. To articulate their interest area, students created posters explaining the challenge, why it should be tackled and the goals they had.
They had 2–3 minutes to present to the class and also received feedback. The feedback included comments on the specificity of the topic, potential research methods and areas of research that they could look into.
It was interesting to see some clear groupings in topics begin to emerge. The class had a lot of interest in food, transport and mental health issues.
Next up, we had Tay, Caroline and Wenqing present their principle lab on immersion.
The team introduced the class to the different factors that contribute to people becoming immersed in an activity. They explained to the class that immersion is a result of a mix of these factors coming together and is also unique for each individual — different factors will trigger people in different ways.
The factors are:
- Challenges that can be overcome e.g. test
- Context without distraction e.g. library
- Clearly defined goals
- Immediate feedback e.g. video game
- Loss of awareness of worries e.g. reading
- Feeling of control over actions e.g. being team lead
- Loss of concern regarding matters of self e.g. forgetting to eat
- Modified sense of time
They then defined two different types of immersion. First, there is perception immersion which is when your senses are activated. Second is cognitive immersion, which is when are in flow — a balance of ability and challenge. The team discussed how perception immersion was much easier to achieve since there were many combinations of senses that were possible to trigger. However, they explained that this was also less likely to be retained by people. Cognitive immersion is more engaging of the two but because of the uniqueness of our experiences and triggers, it is much more difficult to implement.
Next, to make sure the class understood the factors and could get used to applying them, the team created an activity where the rest of the class had to yell out immersion factors that an image represented. Given there were so many factors, the information sheet that the team handed out was a very useful reference.
Finally, the team brought it back to design and why it mattered for us to understand immersion as designers. The class discussed:
- Attention spans are so short so we need to engage people by immersing them and slowing them down
- There are different levels of immersion, which makes it important to understand how to mix and match factors based on audience and what you want to achieve
- Negative effects of immersion — understanding the situations in which you don’t want people to be too immersed. One person mentioned texting or multi-tasking situations where safety is involved
