UX of Yellow: Honeycombing Through — Week 2
Nov 05 ’21 — Nov 11 ‘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)
Our feedback during the interim presentation was basically that we over-complicated the entire toolkit. We were advised to keep the project simple, so that the audience and the volunteers would grasp the intention a bit better.
We decided to break down the qualities that made honeycombs special such as the structure, fragility, the materials, and how lightweight it was. We decided to recreate the telltale hexagonal shape that is spatially wide but also capable of carrying a lot of weight. We wanted to move on from using powders as a tracing medium, so we decided to use a mixture of chocolate and butter to make a set of honeycomb prototypes that would melt whenever people touched it by body heat. We also felt that chocolate was a passable version of honey, since both are largely organic, sticky, and sweet.
However, we did feel that our project could have been much better than the idea of using chocolate as a medium. Chocolate wouldn’t melt enough to have the viscous quality that honey has, liquid chocolate is much more fluid.
We decided to look at other ideas that would encapsulate our concept better. We settled on making an actual honeycomb prototype using paper and a balloon. The structure was pretty similar to hexagonal structure of the honeycomb, and we felt it communicated our intentions for the users pretty well.
The entire class became our volunteer group, with classmates passing around the structure and filling it with honey and pollen. It became an example of how bees collect the propolis and pollen — what ultimately brings out the yellow colour in the honeycomb. We looked into various pigments that had something to do with our concept.
Since the interim presentation had been a little complicated with all the instructions, we decided to freestyle this presentation, hoping our physical artefact and paper honeycomb would do the talking for us. We made sure most of the class got some of the honey and pollen colour tracer on their hands, and we let everyone pass around the honeycomb structure and colour it in the process. Bees do not intend to colour the honeycomb, the colours just appear because the bees are going about their day, gathering pollen and making honey. Our direction was intentional, and we wanted to demonstrate how the process occurred, and how the yellow came to be.
Takeaways: Keep the project simple. Focus on the main concept — the research method should not take away from the basic idea. We also learnt to gravitate towards organic, natural occurrences of the concept.
