REFLECTION MODULE | BY DOUNIA BOURJILA
COMPOSING INTERACTIVITY COMPANY
What I have dealt with mostly in past projects, is looking for good ways to design a certain experience, and understanding how it is being understood by others (project within Wearable Senses & Wellbeing).The hard part was how to finally explain the experience to people, and to validate whether my intended idea was perceived the same way by users. MOVIE AND EDITING
I really liked the first assignment which was making a movie of a daily ritual (making coffee). In my opinion, making movies or short films is an excellent representation of a certain experience/inspiration or interaction. It enables me as a designer to share certain feelings, emotions by means of sound and moving images (which match the dynamic character of interactions). What I really found challenging and certainly a thing I would like to explore more, is letting my movie be judged by others. It is a great tool for a designer to so how the message you want to convey is perceived,by others. The interesting thing is that when making small changes in certain properties of the movie (light, flow or sound) can change the complete movie. NOTATION SYSTEM
The fact that our group was quite large (6 people) made the process more interesting in the sense that very diverse aspects and properties needed to be combined in one notation system. This means the system needs to be highly adaptive to different ‘userprofiles’ and backgrounds. The system we made (consists from different threads that are placed on a plate with metal sticks), seemed to offer the possibility to use it in an unprescribed way, by interacting with the type of material of the thread. I was curious about what would happen if this system was tried out with different people, and to see what people do with the threads. Though, what I found a little bit difficult is to translate the system directly to our design of a new way of picknicking. For me personally, I felt there was a gap between going from the system to the final design, because the ideas we discussed were based on our personal preferences for a picknick and not what the notation system showed us. It could be due to the fact that we designed the picknick for ourselves as users, so the line between being a designer and user at the same time can be blurred. Therefore (maybe a suggestion) it could be interesting if there was more time spent on the notation system. For example by making a second movie which showed how each one of us interacts with it (or all of us at the same time). Though, we made a movie of the notation system, but after finishing the final design of the picknick, therefore we didn’t using it during the process. Another suggestion is to design for somebody else instead of ourselves. I think I would have understood the notation system better if I would have designed it for one of my teammates, or maybe all of them. Other than this, I think this module was highly interesting, fun and challenging. And I think the set-up of short presentations (love that!) combined with clear explanation, short Pecha Coacha’s and plenty of free time to work on the assignments is very good!