Design Fiction Iterations Begin
Iteration I and II
If you have been following my blog posts you would know that my team is in the process of designing prototypes that would potentially improve the Gungan’s life. But don’t worry if this is the first post you are reading in this publication and have no clue what Gungans are. Basically Gungnas are native inhabitants of the planet Naboo in the Star Wars world. They are reptiles that look primitive, but as our grandmothers kept telling us while growing up “appearances can be deceiving”. Gungnas are actually really advance and possess numerous high tech gadgets.
In our previous meetings my team brainstormed multiple solutions for products that would help the Gungans in many ways e.g. educational, leisure, army, etc. I picked two of these ideas to iterate on.
- A Goo Mining Machine
- A transportation to Otoh Gunga for the humans
First let me give you a little background on each of these ideas and explain how they would improve the Gungan’s lives. Goo is essentially the power source for Gungan’s technology, it is mined from the ocean bed. Basically every technology in the Gungan world operate on GOO. We do not know much more about it, only that the extraction process is arduous. I am going to be proposing a solution that eases this process.
Secondly, When their planet got invaded by Naboo humans, Gungans built an underwater city called Otoh Gunga and moved there. You can see a picture of Otoh Gunga at the top this post. This city is well hidden in ocean and the only way for the humans to get there once they know where the entrance is, is to swim. My team is imagining now that Gungans and Naboo humans are in good terms and their conflict has ended they would be visiting each other more often. We all know that getting wet is not really ideal for us humans and also not everybody knows how to swim. So I’ll be designing a solution for this accessibility problem.
After this iteration I am going to pick one idea that resonates the most with me and keep iterating on it till the presentation week.
First Iteration
In this iteration I drew a system that would be the potential solution for both of the problems. In this design the Goo mining process is really similar to oil mining in our world. It starts from extraction to processing and then transferring the processed Goo through a pipeline to supply the energy in each Gungan’s house. In this design while one Gungan extracts the Goo, another keeps a close watch and makes sure everything is under control. The idea is that Goo is potentially dangerous and it’s leakage in ocean is against Gungan’s values. The Bongo (the Gungans very own submarine) is parked near so that in case of emergency and system malfunction they could quickly ask for back up.
My solution to humans getting to Otoh Gunga is as Gungan as it could be. Gungans might have made peace with Naboo people, but the truth is they would want full control over the number of visitors. For this I designed a well-hidden entrance in the middle of jungle that would open to 4 slides. Only one of these slides would take you to the Identification Bubble, the other three would end in the depth of ocean and the visitor would drown. This is to avoid unwanted visits from humans that happen to find the entrance by accident. The way to distinguish the correct slide from the trap ones is a sound frequency that only Gungans can hear. If a human is invited to Otoh Gunga, a Gungan should be accompanying him/her to guide him/her to the correct slide.
My lecturer Jane Tingley preferred the Goo mining idea and her comment was that I need to parse it down and eliminate the error factor, because no matter how well design a system is, it is always vulnerable to error.
Second Iteration
In this iteration i’m focusing on a Goo Extraction device. This time my objective was to design a device with the lowest error margin. The elastic material of Gungan’s houses that I call Bubble inspired this idea. In this design the bubble floats near the ocean bed and has an built in syringe like device that pokes the ocean bed and extracts the Goo and stores it in the bubble. A Gungan is keeping a close watch. To minimize the error there is a fish swimming in the bubble, if the bubble hits it’s capacity, not enough Oxygen would be left in it for the fish to breath and subsequently the fish would die. This alarms the watch Gungan to remove the syringe as fast as possible.
I shared my idea with my teammates, they acknowledged that this approach is much more feasible than the first iteration but killing a fish is against the Gungans values, which I agree with.
My next step is to do a final iteration of a device that not only has a very low error margin but also does not harm the nature and animals in any ways. Selongabye! —See you later in Gunganese
