Week 2: September 20
Initial ideation and concept testing
Team: Laura Rodriguez, Katherine Herzog, Josh LeFevre, & Newell Khale
We decided to test 2D and 3D kits in parallel to see how users would react to the different methods and mediums.
2D Testing Results
As a way of testing the potential of a 2-dimensional kit of parts in expressing emotion, we decided to borrow pieces from the Mental Landscapes set (thick stock paper cut into different shapes and colors.) Participants were asked to create a visualization of each of three emotions/mental states: Joy, Anxiety, and Depression. They were provided an 11" x 17" piece of paper with a space for them to work and room to annotate their creations. Testing with this initial kit revealed several things: Similarities in the shapes used for particular feelings, e.g. the spiral and anxiety, hesitation in engaging with creating something for depression (relative to joy and anxiety), and the benefit of reflecting on certain emotions, particularly anxiety.
3D Testing Results
The second iteration of the kit provided materials to create a three dimensional object. The materials were found items that were available in the design studio. They included among other items, clay, pipe cleaners of various sizes and colors, fluffy balls, wooden skewers, fabric and balloons. Based on testing this kit with participants we found that the participants felt overwhelmed by the amount of material options presented to them and that it difficult to construct structures with large volumes. One interesting thing we observed is that the participants would give meaning to the texture of the elements they were choosing. For example, with the representation below (the pink one), the participant associated “energy” with the fluffy texture of the large pipe cleaner.
In class we decided to test our 3D kit with two classmates to solicit further feedback. Neither of our participants was interested in writing about their representation, and only one of the two felt comfortable sharing about their thought process after the fact. However, we observed some similar patterns in the ways participants chose to use the materials .
Reflection on Testing Results
In reflecting on the testing process, we found that we had conversations with participants about how they felt constrained or empowered by the materials provided. This underlying tension speaks to the unique ways in which people prefer to communicate, particularly when it comes to what can be sensitive topics, and the depth of what can be communicated. We experienced first hand the challenge of navigating the trade-offs we had seen in other projects about what you select to communicate, or in our case empower others to communicate. Two examples of projects we drew on that made choices between similar trade-offs were Giorgia Lupi and Kaki King’s “Bruises” and Jill Simpson’s “A Day of OCD — Conscious Acts of Checking”:
In the design of the visual for “Bruises,” Giorgia Lupi included quantified data, but focused on creating something that could evoke empathy and engage people at an emotional level.
Jill Simpson had to make a similar type of choice. She spoke with our class and commented on the challenge of deciding what to communicate and as a result, what to leave out. Although quantifying the acts of checking was critical to communicating how disruptive OCD is, she spoke about how this approach strips out the complexity and only represents one element of OCD.
Both projects acknowledge the challenge of communicating something so complex as mental health and emotion and make decisions on what to focus on in terms of what they communicate. Realizing the necessity of making a choice, we opted to create a fixed set of materials that would allow participants to feel safe to participate, without the pressure of judgment of their artistic or other skills, and potentially assign meaning to particular objects or qualities of objects. This decision came with an added benefit of enabling us to more easily identify similarities in how people choose to represent particular emotions. We also discovered that participants responded well to the opportunity to create in 3 dimensions. As a result, we began to design a new version of a kit for additional testing.
