Introduction:
Last week, we found inspiration in the Fun Theory Project video that Lion
mentioned, where they convinced more people to take the stairs by turning
them into a piano. Looking at that video a little more closely, we
realized that while for the people on the project, the goal was to make
people make healthier choices, UCSD has a lot of hills and if you go to
class, you can easily get plenty of exercise. That said, UCSD has also
been called UC Socially Dead, and that’s what we plan to change. That
discussion sparked a round of ideas from beacons, small electronic devices
that could send people cell phone messages in certain locations to conga
lines from sixth college to ERC (courtesy of Thomas). So our goal this
coming week is to storyboard a few of those ideas, and try to imagine how
they would turn out in reality.
What each of us thought:
“Before our goal was to make traveling around campus a more pleasurable
experience. However, after discussing with our peers we realized that the
topic was too broad to address within the next 5 weeks. After further
discussion of our problem space, we decided to narrow in on a specific
part of it: campus interaction, specifically the social aspect. One area
of campus we’re interested in investigating is Library Walk, one of the
busiest parts of campus. Once we delve into examining that area and
exploring other possible locations, we eventually reach a idea to pursue
and begin the exciting process of prototyping!”
Take it easy,
Whale
“We took some time this week to understand a little more about what our
users considered to be problems around campus. We wanted to focus on
enjoyability of transportation within campus, but we knew we had to
further that scope down to become even more narrow. After some
deliberation, and considering the user data that was gathered, we decided
to focus on a smaller aspect of campus (still to be decided) that can be
socially enjoyable (to fix the problem of lack of sociability on the UCSD
campus). We’re still looking into how we will be able to do this, but now
that we have a problem space narrowed, we are excited to see some of the
potential solutions that we can come up with!”
Cheers,
Ocelot
“How do we bring fun to UCSD? And how do we make the experience of going
one place to another.. better? After receiving great feedback from our
class and mentors, we realized we needed to tackle how to bring
interactivity between students on Library Walk. Students at UCSD are known
for being introverted, and students even purposely walk different routes
to avoid being talked to on Library Walk. We want to change this. Let’s
break that stereotype of UC Socially Dead!”
Regards,
Lion
“Last week we focused on user interviews and let other opinions guide the
scope of our project. Personally, interviews are not my strong suit. It
seemed that every time I brought up the subject of on campus
transportation, any perfectly normal conversation even with friends would
immediately become as awkward as if I was having it with a complete
stranger. Nevertheless it was helpful and between the four of us we
gathered some useful information. Now however, it’s time to put some of
that information to use, and that’s exciting. The outpouring of ideas from
our peers last week only increased the anticipation and I’m looking
forward to seeing where we can put our newfound information to use.”
Best,
Turtle
