UX of Yellow: Beeing Busy — Week 1
Oct 28 ‘21— Nov 04 ‘21
Task: Design an experience based on the characteristics of the colour
yellow.
Group: Dany Garcia Solano, Zhe Lou, Siyuan Li, Malavika Mahajan and me (Ranga)
Research methods: Artefact analysis, creative toolkit.
For Yellow, we decided to broaden our ideas — we looked into food, metal, food, complementary colours, negative afterimages, light, et cetera. We looked at gold, honey, candles, instances where yellow occurred in nature for our research.
We were a little overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material objects that could be conceivably presented as physical artefacts, but we wanted an artefact that was laden with sensory stimulation and also had “potential” for a creative toolkit to be built around it. Thus, we decided to go with food//honey as our concept for the project. Honey is not a physical artefact by itself, but honeycombs are. As we looked into honey and its many interesting properties, we realised that our conceptual planning and research was complete, and that we had the source material for both our physical artefact and creative toolkit.
Physical artefact: We read up about honeycombs and their material aspect. They consist primarily of beeswax, and also contain propolis, honey, nectar, pollen and dirt that sticks to the bees when they pollinate flowers. The honeycomb consists of yellow, white and brown as its primary colours. They’re asymmetrically shaped hexagonal cylinders that are made for easy access and ventilation. They’re fragile, as we evidenced when a slight press into a piece of honeycomb bent some of the hexagonal cylinders out of shape. They are also relatively brittle and break apart with little to no force — our field visit to a bee farm showed that we should keep in mind that these structures, for all their beauty and intricacy, are made of wax.
We visited Bee Urban in Kennington Park to get a real look into how bee farms work. We saw honeycombs, manmade housing structures for honeycombs. We were told how to look for larvae in the cells, how honey was made, what uses the materials of the honeycomb had, et cetera. It was a very interesting and informative visit indeed.
Creative Toolkit: Our group collectively decided to create the toolkit based off the bees’ hive mind community which requires flawless communication and interaction amongst the participants. Our toolkit involved coloured powder, constructive materials and written instructions. There were a total of six volunteers who had to act like bees. One was the queen bee — they had to tell the other groups about what they were supposed to build with the materials. The next group consisted of 2 drone bees and the last group consisted of three worker bees. They were supposed to build an object using the materials and instructions from the queen bee. We also made sure to put some of the coloured powder on their hands, so when they interacted with the materials and themselves their hands showed different colours. It was an example of bee pollination.
Takeaways: Plan the demonstration better. Time it, and if there is a toolkit involved, do a dry run with contextless participants, not amongst people who already know the essence of the toolkit.
