4/5: Defining Inputs, Outputs, and Interactions

After exploring and brainstorming myriad ways users might interact with Octavia, we began to hone in on specific concept based on personas of the garden users.

Some of the main users that we have decided to focus on are children and families seeking to play and individuals entering who may enter the garden seeking a quiet place to reflect. In both of these cases, being connected to the narratives of the larger garden community would help them to have an experience with Octavia that would be both delightful and offer a sense of relief to those who visit her.

As our objective, we’ve decided to create a way for everyone in the community to have a chance to share something, provide insights, and contribute to the space. We see this taking on an emotional quality in the garden. This may look like an opportunity for visitors to simply let it out, something like what a cat owner might do when chatting with their pet. And it may also take on a sort of conversational quality, like writing on a bathroom wall does, and give the user a chance to leave a unique mark and voice on the space.

With this as our objective, we considered the role of Octavia. First, she would be the operator who prompts you to speak. She might take on some qualities of a therapist, encouraging you to share. But ultimately, she may turn out to be more of a collector, holding onto all the stories, secrets, wishes, etc. in a repository.

We then considered what this might mean for the more detailed interactions with Octavia, based on our previous sketches and storyboards:

1. A user, picking up the phone, would begin to hear a random message left on the phone.
2. Once that message ends, a new message would begin playing. (These messages might be tagged by date in Octavia’s voice.)
3. The hang-up option in the center of the phone would allow users to skip onto the next random message.
4. The user may then choose to leave a message of her own. To do so, she’d simply select the type of message she’d like to leave using the rotary dial.
5. She’d then be prompted by Octavia to leave her message.
6. After leaving her message, she’d hang up the phone to submit the message.

Some questions we have with this flow:

• Is it possible for people to decide to cancel an in-progress message? Would we even want that?
• How can we ensure that the messages on the octopus are safe for children’s ears?

With the first question, this is definitely still a point of debate and consideration, but for now, we plan to move forward without the option to cancel a message. With the second question, we’ve decided that messages that end up on Octavia in the garden must be approved by some kind of moderator, but whether that moderator will be human or computer is still undecided.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of the leaving options we are considering:

• Tell a story
• Make a wish
• Share a secret
• Rant
• Express joy
• Say something random

We then moved onto our UIs. We like the idea of two options for a way to view this repository of messages. One would be a reverse chronological and filterable endless-scroll list of all the messages left on Octavia. The other would be a natural leaf like mosaic that would be fluid as the items are scrolled over and clicked on. Each message would be a leaf, possible different sizes based on message length and different colors for categories of messages.

We think that ultimately this is not just about fixing individual problems, it’s about seeing what’s going on in the community on the whole and using this collective anecdotal information to figure out the future of the garden and what the community wants and needs the space to be.