For this assignment my team looked at making in an artifact that had the ability to bring multiple people together in the real world through communication and interaction with each other.
This was based on the idea that as technology has evolved throughout the world, people have been pushed further away from each other with things like the Internet and social networking taking away from everyday real life interaction. Whilst this has its benefits, the aspect of real life interaction is a true need when communicating with each other. This can have significant implications in the makeup of a person, which in turn can be end up being detrimental to society. We wanted to try and invert that idea and be able to create and harbor interaction and communication between people in the real life.
Because there were multiple elements in this idea that we had not touched upon before and since these topics were crucial to whether our project succeeded or not, we chose to spend more time early in our process researching into these topics. We looked into three main areas; social interaction, communication and case studies, which can all be found in our design processes book.
The research did into these areas gave us a lot of insight into what the best ways would be to tackle these ideas through our artifact. One of the aspects we discovered in our research was that cooperation was the best route to create an uplifting interaction through bringing people together a common goal. While another was that we needed to make our reward be worth more than the cost involved to get people to communicate with each other, meaning balancing the effort needed from people to get involved with our artifact.
From here we went into mocking up our designs, which took various forms and multiple stages to refine. Starting with early mock-ups we narrowed it down and developed at each stage till we found our concept. Our final idea is a two-player arcade that included a game where communications between two people were needed in order to play. This is done by players being situated across from each other and unable to see what was on the other players screen. We also wanted to look at a possible location in which this could be most suited for and in theory a place our idea could be applied to. We found that bus stops are everywhere, they have people at them that are often seen on their phones or listening to music and they have space for our project on the poster ad boards. So we thought these would be the best place to integrate our project.
When making our idea we had multiple aspects to figure out and build, including the processing for the game itself, the electronics for the Arduino and controllers and the woodworking for the cabinet as well. All of which we had some troubles in, some more than others. Like in our game where processing would bug out when we changed one piece and break in a different way we put it back. Getting all the edges of the cabinet to line up as much as possible. Also getting all the controls to work with the correct input.
I believe in the end our project came out pretty good but probably not in the way we intended, as we found that our arcade we made wasn’t the best at starting interaction between strangers, but instead it strengthened communication and interaction between two people. This can be seen in our video located below. Which in it we filmed our arcade left in a couple public spaces and observed people playing and interacting with it. From this we found that people tended to be more receptive to interacting with it when with someone they knew. Although there were instances of people coming to see what the arcade was about.
So when we thought we had failed, we started to notice that when people were playing the game, their communication and understanding between them got better the more they played. This seemed to be partly due to the difficult nature of the game and meant if people were to succeed they needed to quickly find a way to efficiently communicate objectives to their partner and all pairs managed this, some faster than others. I think it probably ended up working like this and not creating communication because of the seclusion factor of being a single person on a two-player game. Although it may be more of a marketing aspect that is needed to change the way people think of this game. This would be good way to further explore this concept.
I like how this project got me to think about how and why we communicate and ways in which we can enhance communication between people. As these are something I would have never looked at otherwise. It also showed me how much of an impact knowing someone has on how people communicated and interact. As well as the significance in having a shared experience to talk about. Also how communication and relationships between people can be made stronger through multiple ways. Finally in the way our project technically solved our problem but not in the expected way and the implications there were from it doing that.
