UX of Boredom: Week 1
UX of Boredom, Oct 14 — Oct 21
Task: Design a way to express the value of boredom.
Group: Dany Garcia Solano, Effy Liu, Siyuan Yan, Ella Wilson and me (Ranga)
Research methods: Directed storytelling and Prototyping
Disclaimer: This was by far the toughest of all the briefs in this module. It was so difficult that even during conceptualising the idea we weren’t sure if our premise was strong enough for the project to be done the way we did it.
Idea generation: It was an entirely different task to express the value, though. All of us decided to split up and do our own separate research and come back with an idea or two, since our discussions weren’t really leading us down a straight path. Up until this point we were blundering about in the creative wilderness. The research revealed a couple of points: 1) an article stated that bored people were prone to a sort of destructive creativity, and that relatively fewer people engaged in build-up sort of creativity — such as engaging in a hobby or mastering a new life skill and 2) Novelty alleviates boredom — such as people going on vacations or taking a break.
We decided to workshop two different ideas to gauge audience reactions during the interim presentation:
“Pillowcase” Idea: We decided to fill up a pillowcase with objects — things one would not necessarily expect inside of a pillowcase. This was our prototype — based on the supposition that novelty alleviates boredom, and we wanted (and were encouraged) to stay away from digital media. We tried to add as much sensory stimulation as possible by adding objects that made sounds, smelled different, had different textures and ended up with a generally unwieldy package of sorts.
Table Idea: Following the directed storytelling method, we also decided to give a group of volunteers three tables and asked them to freely interact with them — one table with naturally occurring materials like leaves and twigs, accompanied with some other objects; one with a singular novelty object — we chose a dial-up telephone for the experiment; and the last table had some artificial materials — a couple of receipts, a pencil, a calculator. We noticed how they interacted with the objects for a set time frame.
Our presentation worked well, and we also took feedback from the volunteers in the Live Demo idea to get a better sense of how to simulate boredom better in the classroom environment.
We also had a discussion on how to proceed with these two ideas and sort of combine them into one cohesive concept for the final presentation.
Takeaways: We learnt that it’s better to try out multiple ideas if the group isn’t sure which idea we should stick to for the interim presentation. That way we were able to gauge audience reaction and engagement while deciding how to progress for next week’s final presentation.
