Light Bulbs and a Blue Nipple !
21.04.2023 | Day 5 | Production Exercise 2
Good morning! Let’s get to work! Ideation time came ‘round and we had exactly 2 hours to come up with an interesting idea for the prototype before presenting it to Lea Schorling from the Invisible Room. Lea will be guiding us with the concrete prototyping next week and so it was important to provide her a sense of direction so she can prepare as well.
Stefania Matache, Pal Pratima and I created our taskforce: “Blue Nipple”.
We started our day creating a user persona who is in their early twenties, has no habit of going to the theatre, is a student or someone who works a minimum wage job, takes public transport, has an immigrant background, who experiences gender oppression but is not actively theoretically researching this. In short, someone the Freies Werkstatt Theater (FWT) mentioned they want to appeal to more.
Questions we asked ourselves were:
- How can we create something that could excite them to go to a theatre piece?
- Why would a feminist piece be interesting to them?
- Make it funny / entertaining? (Yes)
- What did we find funny during the play? (Pussypops, the deliverance of the script — the breaks/silences, absurd word choices etc)
Going down the entertainment-route, we decided for something with gameplay. We thought of a set of minigames which correlate to the acts in the play. However it did not really involve much WebXR and although you can translate that into AR, it would be boring as the AR does not contribute to the gameplay itself.
After giving our presentation we received this exact feedback also, and this made us rethink our idea again. It was fun however to listen to the amazing, creative ideas from the other two taskforces. It is going to be so exciting to develop our prototypes I think!
Lunchbreak passed and we came back for a final “production exercise toolkit learning session”. Maren Demant gave us a more in-depth lecture on design thinking and how to eventually present our work to the FWT, which would be “the piece of cake” method. (I don’t make these names up)
If your project is the entire cake, you’d want to give the client not just the top part of the cake but a nice thick piece of cake in which all layers can be tasted. Later, we learnt more about the use of flowcharts and how they can help us think of our prototype from a more interactive POV. It is particularly useful for detecting any gaps in the user experience while they would interact with our project. To top it off, we learnt some more about agile development methods such as:
- Cone of Uncertainty (developed by NASA)
- Scrum — managing the production process, taking care of backlogs, sprint backlogs, sprints, product increments etc.
- “Sprints” (sprint 1/sprint 2/sprint 3) — each sprint reaches a milestone and so you continue to progress
After this last bit, Blue Nipple decided to relocate to another room for a second round of serious ideation. We decided to focus on the AR aspect first and then we just voiced our thought processes. Eventually we arrived at the idea of creating an AR vulva (2D or 3D object) that can be interacted with. We would work with anchoring points throughout the city that are scannable with a smartphone. Once the anchor is scanned, a vulva appears in the real world environment. The interactor would stimulate the clitoris with either hand movement in the real-time environment or by tapping/stroking on the screen (not sure yet) and then, if done right, the vulva will open up like a portal (yes yes many metaphors here). What is on the inside however, we still have to figure out. We got some ideas like a “vulva vault” or certain parts of the play the audience could interact with, but it still remains to be seen this part!
See you on Monday! x
