Translating Affordances — Dune!
For this week’s Ideation and Prototyping assignment, we are required to think of ways in which we can translate digital affordances to physical affordances. We are encouraged to go backward in the process of designing and are required to go from a digital interface to a tangible and physical interface. I was a little confused about the requirements and expectations of the project as I was unclear what Affordance means in this context. So I spent some time understanding what affordance is and why it is important to understand the behavior of every object in a system to be able to create better and more useful experiences for users.
I began with the first task which was to choose any kind of digital interface to model my project on. My instant thought was to choose a mobile application or mobile game as the digital interface. Next, I started thinking about what kind of interactions and gestures are most popular with apps today.
Most of our interactions with a digital surface are either a tap or a swipe. Other interactions can be tilting the screen if the device has an inbuilt accelerometer. Keeping these in mind, I chose the game Dune! by voodoo to model my assignment this week. Dune is a very minimalistic game with just two gestures included within the game. The goal of the game is to control the ball and to get it as far into the desert as possible by landing, sliding, and gliding on dunes.
The first gesture is holding, which does different things in different contexts. If the ball is on a hand dune, the hold will accelerate the ball. If the ball is in the air, the hold will bring the ball down. And release after a hold will let the ball fly.
Process
I started my process by identifying what I feel while playing the game. I did this by playing the game a few many times in a short period to put pressure on myself (to feel more).
I identified the following:
- The smooth moves and smooth landings bring Satisfaction.
- The satisfying nature of the moves induces a feeling of Craving to keep achieving this.
- Since the score is always displayed and is changing in real-time as we play, Competitiveness is felt.
- When the timing of landing is not done correctly, The ball gets stuck immediately and this brings about a feeling of Frustration
- Hands are calm as the grip is Relaxed. At no point in the game did I tense my grip up.
From the above exercise, I was able to conclude that the smooth movements and the accurate landings were the most important features I had to translate.
I needed to build something that somewhat resembles the game in terms of having a ball rolling around but also somehow mimicking the feeling of playing the actual game without having to use a screen. At this point, I'm overwhelmed. I had a million thoughts on how to model sad dunes but wasn't sure how practical this could be. So I moved on to brainstorming and sketching to help me think and visualize clearly.
I started with modeling the crests and troughs of what will eventually represent the smooth dunes in the game. I tried sketching down different cuts and orientations of different materials I had laying around the house. I found that some orientations allowed for trenches while some did not. I was also painfully reminded of the limitations in the amount of materials I had at my disposal. I decided to make a very rough and quick prototype which I call Prototype #1 with things I could quickly assemble without too much cutting and molding.
Few things I really wanted to include in the prototype were the smooth finish of the dunes as well as the continuous nature of the game. I decided to have rounded edges to the physical affordance to make sure that the ball doesn't stop abruptly at the end and can smoothly roll its way back to the beginning.
Through the process of making prototype #1, I was able to identify some things that weren't translating too well and some issues I was not comfortable having in the next prototype. So I made a note of these issues and tried to brainstorm ways to fix these issues. The problems identified can be seen in blueprint #2.
I went on to create my next prototype addressing the issues identified earlier. I also used different materials at different scales for a better finish.
The final prototype is more durable and can be tilted along all axes. The silver ball inside is supposed to be a replica of the ball in the game. A plastic bottle was cut up and used to model the dunes to mimic the frictionless smooth movement. An extra obstacle was added in the middle of the model to add an element of frustration to the game. The ball was made using a caramel popcorn kernel covered in used aluminum foil.
