Territory Definition & More
1/30: Territory Definition Presentation
On Monday, 1/30, our team presented our initial territory map to Microsoft to get feedback on this first phase of design research. (You can view a PDF of our presentation here.) After our initial two weeks of exploration and brainstorming, we decided to define our design territory as an exploration into the topic of travel within a Mixed-Reality future. Specifically, how can we enable travelers to have more mindful experiences (i.e. be present and in the moment) in an era where technology serves to distract even more than our present-day phones?
Our territory map, below, shows our understanding of the traveler’s experience and the factors that hinder his/her mindful traveling. The outermost ring (i.e. Personality, Age, etc.) displays the factors that affect a mindful travel experience. These factors can be either internal to the traveler (i.e. Health & Abilities, Personality, etc.) or external (i.e. Solo / Group, Budget, etc.) and are explored according to WHO is affected by the factor, WHAT keeps them from having a mindful travel experience, and the resulting emotions (HOW).
For example, an inexperienced female solo traveler may have difficulty finding a mindful travel experience because she attracts unwanted attention and fears for her safety, which could lead to her feeling anxious and lonely.
Zooming out of the individual level, we also explored the motivations that lie behind a mindful travel experience, as well as the trends in present-day travel. Through looking at the intersect of the individual’s mindful travel experience, their motivations for having a mindful travel experience, and the trends present in travel, we highlighted three possible opportunities for the development of a Mixed Reality solution in the realm of mindful travel.
We received ambivalent feedback regarding our territory. Most importantly, our audience was unsure whether they truly understood what we meant by ‘mindful,’ and found the term to be very subjective and broad. Additionally, the idea of ‘travel’ was too broad for meaningful feedback — is it travel for leisure? Travel with a group? Although we explained that our territory map serves as a framework for our further scoping of the domain within travel we would like to delver further in, it was too difficult for our audience to give us specific-enough feedback on our project direction. Some other questions asked were:
- What is meant by “mindfulness?” How do different people define mindfulness?
- What prevents people from traveling the way that they want to?
- What opportunities are there in the realm of sharing?
- Why the focus on the negative emotions? Can we amplify the positive?
- Who are you going to talk to? Specific stakeholders?
Some next steps recommended to us during the review were:
- Move quickly, start speaking with people to help narrow the scope
- In future presentations, tie it back to the brief
2/1: Further Scoping + Moving Quickly
As a result of the feedback we received from the presentation, our team met several times over the week to quickly narrow our direction. From our conversations, we decided to tackle the issues of “memory collection and sharing” and “cognitive overload” within the realm of travel. However, because of the possibility of cognitive overload to be a part of the issues within memory collection and sharing, we decided to only focus on the former topic.
Peter gave us the suggestion of exploring stakeholders who partake in some aspect of experience sharing but are not immediately related to travel. A quick list we generated together is as follows:
- Tour Operators
- Travel Agents
- Crime — a lot of VR is being used to document crime scenes and war scenes (immersive experience connected to the site)
- Capturer & Viewer: what is this relationship?
- Sharing with everybody? Sharing with particular people?
To kickstart our exploratory process, we asked two of our classmates to participate in our first interviews. Both interviewees are avid travelers — one is an avid solo traveler, while the other travels solely with family or friends. A follow-up post about the insights we gained from the interviews will be added in a later post.
2/2: Meeting with Stakeholders
After our initial two interviews, our team decided to interview as many individuals as we can over the weekend and synthesize our findings on Monday. Because the scope of our current focus is still relatively broad — memory capture & sharing — we are hoping that after this initial round of exploratory interviews we would be able to come to a single, articulated direction. We would then conduct a second round of exploratory interviews and activities (observations, cultural probes, etc.) for the remainder of the week prior to our presentation the following week.
For the weekend, we are going to be interviewing or scheduling meetings with the following types of stakeholders:
- Individuals who are far away from family on a regular basis, or seldom see their family — do they regard memory capture differently than individuals who see loved ones often?
- Digital ghosts — why do they not want to partake in memory capture with digital media?
- Photographers — how do they view the act of capturing images?
- Elderly — how is memory capture different for them, as compared to the younger generations?
- Bloggers & internet celebrities — what is the role of memory capture in their work?
- Individuals experiencing cognitive decline / dementia — what does cognitive decline do to an individual’s recognition of memory and its values?
- Extreme sports — what is the role of memory capture for individuals engaged in these extreme physical activities?
