Environments Studio Project 2: MR School of Design Tour
The Brief
With this project, we are supposed to redesign the CMU School of Design tour with the assumption that we are ten years out in the future, when technology like the Microsoft Holo lens is ubiquitous. We are to enhance the user’s experience by incorporating a mixed reality element into the tour. We specifically will be prototyping and designing one stop in the tour to highlight some part of the school of design, specifically one freshman year project.
Understanding the Users
The first step we took in redesigning the tours was understanding our users by making personas of the people that come to these tours. I made four personas, two individual students and 1 parent and student pair.
Brainstorming
The freshman year project that I want to highlight is the Trash animal project, in which we collected used containers of plastic and found forms in them that related to the endangered animal that we were studying. We then recreated that animal using the trash pieces by gluing them together. I wanted to focus on this project because the emphasis on seeing forms could be highlighted through the lens.
Scenario 1
Above I pictured my first storyboard of the interaction I am focusing on, the creation of the trash animal. For this storyboard, I isolated the tour experience to just the experience that the guests have in the freshman studio. Currently the tour guide will go to a student in studio and ask them to talk about the work that they are currently doing. To replace this, I wanted to put the guests into the actual shoes of the first year students.
The first screen that the user sees determines which project they are going to experience, based on the main tracks offered at the school. The project I am going to prototype specifically is the Products project option, which is the track the animal project most closely resembles.
Then the project brief is projected to the user. Then the animal that they are meant to recreate, in my case the California Brown Pelican is projected in front of them. The user can interact and turn the pelican in order to understand all the facets. Then the pelican will separate into the parts that need to be made, with the specific parts listed next to the bird on screen.
All this content shrinks and moves to the back of the desk, something that the user can continue to reference as they work through the project. The trash they have to use is digitally projected in front of them and the user must pick up each piece of trash and find forms in it that look like the parts of the bird they need to create. They continue through this process until the pelican is completed in front of them
Edits to be Made/Questions
- Work through how the guests make it to the freshman studio
- Is there a tour guide in this experience?
- When is the Holo Lens going to be utilized in the tour right now?
- Is this an individual experience? What are all the guest experiencing at this time? How do parent and student pairs experience this?
- Where is this going to happen in freshman studio?
- How does being in freshman studio add anything to this experience?
- Could this tour be done virtually completely? Are you taking advantage of AR?
- Is this just like a video of how the project was completed or are you bringing something different here? How long will this take as well?
Storyboarding with Gravity Sketch
Once we had our storyboards drawn out on paper, we were tasked to create storyboards using the Oculus lens. This would allow us to visualize our spaces in a 3 dimensional setting which is the space in which this idea would actually exist.
I opted to use gravity sketch to create a rough mock up of my space. I specifically storyboarded out the scene in which the user picks up an item of trash and is prompted to cut the piece through the lines that form around the object.
This task allowed me to see what my space would look like in my first version. However, as I progressed through developing my idea, I realized that this is not exactly the set up I wanted for my space.
Scenario 2
With my second storyboard, I worked through making the changes I described in the above storyboard. I determined that I want there to be a tour guide for the actual tour process as it allows the users to ask questions, which I feel is crucial for a tour experience.
The first stop in the tour is the same as it is currently, the design office. This allows the guests to interact with Melissa, and pick her brain with any questions that they may have.
Then, the tour continues into the freshman studio, where the tour guide will pass out the lenses outside of the studio. I am dedicating the front corner of the studio, where the whiteboards are located for the tour, because I do not want the tours to interfere with the work that the students are completing, as I know that I would not want my workspace to be interfered with by touring students.
When the guests put the lens on, the first scene they will see will prompt them to pick a track, the track that they are the most interested in. Then they will be sorted into groups based on what track they pick. If parents want to stay with their students they just need to pick the same track as their student, something the guide will make clear at the beginning of the tour.
So once the tour is divided into the different groups, they start working together to finish the project. The one that I am prototyping out is still the trash animal. The general timeline is still the same except now people are going to working together to complete this project which solves the time aspect as well as mimics the collaborative environment of studio.
In order to take advantage of the AR capabilities of the software and not make the tour completely digital, I want to make the trash physical, so that the guests can turn the trash around in their hands. The section of the trash that the user needs for the project highlights and the user can cut around that form using their finger as the “x-acto knife.” This piece digitalizes and goes to the center of the table and starts to form the bird. In this version of the project, the users do not know what they are making, the project just forms in front of them.
Self Reflection: Increasing Digital Presence
As the prevalence of digital media increases in our physical spaces, it falls upon designers to decide how much digital media they want to include. It would be concerning to see a complete shift to digital spaces, with virtual reality sets becoming part of our daily lives, all of us just living in our own digital worlds and spaces.
However, designers can take the advantages that come with the increasing technology to create enhanced spaces and experiences for people. This is what we can see with the project that we are working on now. Understanding what elements will create better experiences in a physical form rather than a digital form will allow us to create experiences that take advantage of the tools that we have been given.
Working through the Interaction Details
With my next storyboard, I focused on the elements of the interactions that I needed to flush out more thoroughly. I specifically narrowed in on hand movements and motions that the user would need to use throughout the process to complete the project.
This storyboard provided me with the base knowledge I needed in order to start filming and planning out my sketch video.
Storyboarding My Sketch Video
With this final storyboard, I worked through all the details that were on separate storyboards and combined them to one storyboard. I emphasized the hand interactions that the user would use and the specific instructions the user would need to complete the interaction.
Final Sketch Video
Final Self Reflection
The two projects that we completed in this mini were quite different on the surface and therefore the skills that we gained in both were different as well. In the first project, we were given a set space which really challenged us to think about scales and the manner in which the scales of the elements that we would complete the experience. There was more of an emphasis on the physical space rather than that of the digital.
On the other hand, in the second project there was more of a balance between the two. In fact, the challenge that most of us had with the second project was not letting the amount of digital work that we included in the space come to overwhelm the benefits of being in a physical space. We grasped tangible tools in this project by coming to understand VR tools like Reality Composer and Gravity sketch.
Both projects prompted us to really think about the experiences holistically. Whether or not each interaction did much for the overall experience, what the overall benefits were of each element that we added in to the space. Both of these projects surrounded experiences that really immersed the user into the space and both had an end goal of what they wanted the user to feel after they had completed the interaction.
So I believe the role of an environments designer, is to design experiences for people, and these experience often straddle the line between digital and physical. Finding that ideal balance is what makes the work so particularly appealing.
