Week 6: October 18

Testing & Synthesis

Team: Laura Rodriguez, Katherine Herzog, Josh LeFevre, & Newell Khale

This week we began testing our final design kit with students within CMU. From our initial testing and research we found that allowing individuals to create their representation in private yielded the most emotionally complex results. (Read more about our process in previous posts.)

Below, we will outline the results of our final testing. Our goal in testing was to verify the efficacy of the kit as well as to see what patterns might emerge across individual creations and the meanings participants chose to attach to certain shapes and materials.

The final kit included cubic, rectangular, cylindrical, spherical, and hemispherical geometric shapes in various sizes and materials (stone, plastic, felt, and wood.) Along with the volumes, we provided stiff wood connectors and flexible silicone connectors for participants to build with. We also found that for some participants, providing a base or platform on which to make their object lowered barriers for participation. As such, we provided three types of bases (clear square bases with holes as well as wooden circular bases with and without holes.)

Testing

To test our kit, we approached several students on campus and asked them if they had a few spare minutes to participate in our research. A generalized structure of the prompt and conversation is provided here:

RESEARCHER: Hello, My name is _____, I am a masters student here conducting anonymous research on the emotional and mental states of students at Carnegie Mellon. Would you be willing to take 5 minutes to help us understand how you visualize your emotions/mental state?

PARTICIPANT: Sure

RESEARCHER: Great! Please take a moment to consider the emotions or mental states you’ve experienced in the last 24 hours. (pause) Now, choose the most prominent emotion or mental state and write it on this tag. Then use the pieces in this kit to model the emotion you wrote. Please feel free to take as much time as you need. I’ll just sit over here but feel free to ask me any questions. When you’re done, just let me know and I’d like to talk about what you made and take a picture of your creation, but only if you are ok with that.

PARTICIPANT: Fun! (makes object)

PARTICIPANT: Done.

RESEARCHER: Cool. This looks awesome. Before I take a picture, if you feel comfortable, would you mind walking me through what this creation means to you and why you chose the shapes/materials that you used?

PARTICIPANT: Participant explains creation and meaning assigned to elements of their model. This opened up many deep thoughts and ideas they were experiencing (100% of participants we interviewed were excited to share what they had created and explain it to us).

RESEARCHER: Back and forth conversation until done.

RESEARCHER: Thank you for participating, your work and comments will remain annonymous. Since this is your work, would you please take a picture for me of your creation from the angle your creation should be viewed from?

PARTICIPANT: Sure.

RESEARCHER: Great! Would you like a copy of your picture? (95% said yes; then we took a picture with our polaroid camera and left them with the photo)

Synthesis

We were able to test with over 30 students. After the interviews we began pairing the same emotional models together, along with the basics of their descriptions to see what similarities or themes we could find.

Below, you can see a sampling of emotional representations created.

(above) One participant created a family of emotions. The participant noted that every mental state is a collection of competing emotions that live together and act as a cohesive emotional family–fear, sadness, loneliness, Anxiety, joy/happiness.

Material Insights

Each section below contains the most common metaphors used by participants when describing various attributes. Interestingly, there were many overlaps between geometry, materiality, etc.

Geometry

• Squares: were used as metaphors for stability, balance, structure, competition, connection, building, strength, and a unchanging nature.
• Rectangles: were used as metaphors for consistency, consecutiveness, obstacles, and barriers.
• Cylinders: were used as metaphors for slyness, unpredictability, humor, brains, and mobility.
• Spheres: were used as metaphors for weight, flexibility, instability, motion, change, and potential.
• Hemispheres: Were used as metaphors for stability, imbalance, resoluteness, individuality, and protection.

Materiality

• Felt: happiness, soft emotions, flexibility, and pliability.
• Plastic: cold, unfeeling, imposed by others or self, and opportunity.
• Wood: natural, daily occurrence, comforting, and familiarity.
• Stone: strength, weight, unchangeable, and supportive.
• Stiff connectors: specific and defined.
• Flexible connectors: undefined, changing, and tiring.

Color

• Black: darkness, sadness, deepness of feeling, contrast, nagging, mystery, pressure, and changability.
• White: happiness, unkown, day, clarity, and achievable.
• Natural: warmth, honesty, and transitory.
• Grey: necessary, indecisive, weighty, and unchanging.

Bases/no bases

• The bases had little metaphor or thought assigned to them. Participants regarded them more as opportunities for building.

Emotional/mental state insights

1. Overall, participants responded very positively to the process of modeling their emotions and were generally enthusiastic (many noted that creating their emotions felt “liberating.”) We also observed that after individuals had finished creating their representation of an emotional or mental state, it became easier for them to share their thoughts, validating our theory that by “externalizing” their emotions, people might feel more comfortable discussing them. We believe that by addressing their emotions as a now-physical object, participants were relieved of the burden that comes from having to talk directly about themselves. We also found that most individuals wanted to keep a photograph of their creation because, as one participant noted, “it feels like a part of me.”

2. Joy and positive emotions emotional states were typically small and relatively simple. Many participants noted that happy emotions seem “easy” and simple to construct, while more negative emotions tended to be more complex and unwieldy, resulting in representations that embodied barriers and restrictions.

3. We found with some creations, even those that represented more positive emotions, that participants were excited to take part, but there was still an undercurrent of uncertainty and tension evoked by the thought of sharing their emotions.

Next Steps

1. Test with a larger sample size to aggregate more responses.
2. Codify participant explanations.
3. Display objects and allow people to react to what they see.

Reflection

This was an amazing project. We learned quite a bit about how individuals think, what prompts them to engage, and how externalizing thoughts encourages non-judgmental observation and discussion around difficult topics often locked inside one’s head.

We believe this activity helped participants move beyond the some of the more typical metaphors associated with mental states/health (such as describing depression as “being in a pit of despair”) and assign meaning to physical objects more abstractly. It was interesting to explore how individuals apply meaning to objects, materials, and shape and how even with a simplified palette they are able to explain a complex feeling.