UX of Human Senses

Oct 7 , ‘21— Oct 14, ‘21.

Task: Design a tool or instrument that enables you to access the invisible, the unmeasurable, the intangible on London’s streets.

Group: Vicki Sun, Desire Obah, Greta Chen, Jinqi Han and myself (Ranga)

Vicki, Desire and Jinqi on a call with Greta while working together on the project.

Confusion: As a MA UX student, my first project began in utter confusion. I thought I was the only one, till I realised most of us shared that same feeling of being lost in a web of information and freedom and not knowing what to do with it. So we decided to embrace the path of our predecessors: freestyling. We brainstormed about what we wanted from our output and how it’d be relevant, communicative, and, above all, weird and real.

Balance: Our idea was simple: people walk with balance naturally. They don’t even notice balance as a sense, things like vertigo and loss of equilibrium aren’t felt while walking down market alleyways. So we decided to make something that’d throw people off balance.

We decided to pass it by, since we weren’t sure we’d be able to knock people off-balance every time, and we wanted to get as efficient as possible with the results.

Light and warmth: Our second idea was a lightbulb moment, which is a little on the nose. We saw how people preferred to move a little bit while standing, and some even crossed the street to move into the sunlit sections of the pavement.

Sound: During our aimless walking through the markets, all of us were struck by a common theme: how much sensory overload there was, and how journaling it all would be… work. We commented on how it’d be easy to just speak instead of typing it all out, and thus our final idea hatched seed: an audio diary.

It did help that all of us were international students, and the majority (if not all) had never been to London before. So we decided to do “A Day In The Life Of An International Student”.

Recording noises: We all set off with another(!) common goal in mind — to note down and record as many noises as we heard in our daily lives. We noticed how many noises were chaotic and, well, noisy, in the sense that there was no pattern to them and they were all harsh and discomfiting in nature.

We recorded ourselves doing such activities such as gargling, brushing our teeth and even chewing food to add a realistic and oddly ASMR-like quality to the audio diary.

Sounds being recorded over the phone.

Takeaways: This project, even though it was relatively shorter, was a very eye-opening experience in the sense that I wasn’t expected to devise an actual solution to a, well, problem. It was an experience, and it set the tone for how I approached the rest of the module.