Hi Wonder Lab 3!

Fantastci job yesterday. See you tomororw. Please don't forget to burn a disk of your process and final probe for the archives. 

Kristin

We presented our final probes in class today to get some feedback. On Monday, we will bring back more responses from probing and begin packaging the project to display at our show. 

Did you source a strong idea for your research from the first assignment?

Did you explore this area sufficiently to understand where a research angle might be?

Did you create a clear and appropriate research protocol that addressed the topic area, including:

•  identifying the right people to engage with
• creating the right form of research questions and investigation
• making the appropriate form of research probe, interview questions,

Did you capture enough materials to bring back into the studio and work with?

Did you analyse the materials you brought back to a sufficient depth?

Did you create useful meaning from these materials?

Did you identify the insights that the work produced?

Did you make something to share the results that communicated the things you discovered in an effective and compelling way?

Did you learn from things that went wrong, and reframe your work when necessary?

A very rough first model of D*OUIJA!  (The designer's Ouija board)

Our four words of people, service, location, and object were Buddhist, Nailcare, Church, and Magazines respectively. Because the words, "church" and "magazine", were something both Jenny and I were very familiar with, we decided to try new experiences dealing with the words, "Buddhist" and "Nailcare". First, we went to the Three Rivers Dharma Center, which is a Tibetan Buddhist Center located on Craig street, and attended a Om Ah Hung chanting meditation session.

The session included spoken repetitions of a prayer book and the Om Ah Hung chanting meditation. The Om Ah Hung chanting meditation is a type of Tibetan meditation that rids of the negative energies and find peace within yourself. The Om represents your body, Ah represents your speech, and Hung represents the mind. During the meditation, you visualize the Om, Ah, and Hung into white, red, and blue lights and make them disappear. The meditation was a calming experience, yet the fact that the Buddhist center was located in a tiny basement and the meditation was led by a recorded voice on tape depreciated the experience. There was a tea party afterwards, and we had the chance to talk to some of the members about buddhism and the meditation, however most out of the dozen people that attended the meeting were newcomers and left immediately after the meditation session.

Afterwards we went to Lewis' Hair and Nail Salon in Shadyside.

We signed up for an appointment to get nailcare. Apart from the whole pampering process of getting the nails done, we were able to hear stories from the nailcarer about her education in cosmetology, the regular clients she gets, and the conversations that she has with them.

Then, we came back to the studio in order to discover what patterns and correlations lies within our experiences.

First, we link the different experiences with key themes, such as lifestyles, relieving stress, role models, and environments. For example, we saw that church or buddhist temples advocated a certain lifestyle of practicing a religion, while reading women's magazines such as Cosmopolitan and getting your nails done weekly was a different lifestyle. There were also role models involved in each key word as well. While the Christians and Buddhists followed the teachings of Christ and Buddha respectively, subscribers of Cosmopolitan were following images of confident and sexy female figures. Then, we probed deeper into these key themes and discovered interesting questions that arised. We started talking about how people start getting into religions, and realized a lot of personal beliefs are influenced by our parents. This is how we came up with our question- how are the lives of parents reflected in their children's lives?

 

We brainstormed on different methods to approach this question initially with the help of IDEO's method cards. We came down to three different survey tools that we could use. The first involved parents with relatively young children. We wanted them to draw a blueprint of their childhood home and draw a blueprint of their home now, and through a series of exercies and questions, look into how their childhood has affected the way the parent raises their children now. The second survey involved using teenagers to see how their personalities are similar or different from their parents and how the teenagers' perception of their parents' personalities differ from their parent's own judgement of personality. Through this exercise, we hoped to see patterns in relationships between parent and child through the results. The final method involved asking adults two questions- "if your parents saw your life now, then what would they be proud of?" and "if your parents saw your life now, then what would they be disappointed by?".

We knew that in the span of this lab, we weren't going to have enough time to explore all three methods. Therefore, we went with the method of parents' pride and disappointments in their children, because we believed it to be most concrete. We went ahead and started to test the surveys, and we saw a range of responses, especially with the disappointments. 

We started to see some correlations and themes, however we we needed more responses to draw more connections, so we continued conducting surveys.

We divided the responses into different categories of disappointments first, because much of the positives involved success. Within the categories, we were further able to categorize with the semantics of what people wrote. For example, under the category of health, some people referred to bad eating habits, lack of exercise, or their apperance of getting fat. Furthermore, under the category of work ethics, some people responded that they procrastinate, sometimes receive B's, or that they overwork. How they phrased the disappointments all differed in meaning and revealed different relationships with their parents.

Our next stage will involve creating different personas of the parents with the responses. Then, we want to create an in-depth interview where the interviewee will relate their parents to a certain persona, and the questions or the phrasing of the questions will change according to the personas. 

 

 

A little more than a week after we launched OMGCMU, it has 600+ fans. I think we really hit on something that people relate to. We tried to take it further in terms of research by approaching people with “traditional” research methods juxtaposed with humorous but realized that it was at the end of the day, the idea is not about research, it’s about the small moment of laughter each image brings. 

The uploaded photos have been receiving a decent amount of feedback, some reaching as many as 60 likes and comments. 

Some statistics on feedback we have received so far on our page:

We initially mapped out the interactions based on comments, similar likes, and shares. But we soon figured out that the posts were being made faster than we could physically link the interactions. It was an interesting exercise to visualize these interactions though.

The next step is to create some sort of public physical display of these images and watch those reactions. This may also be on display at the final show. 

 

 

From today's class. 

We traveled to a haunted spot 45 minutes away called "Blue Mist Road" with a car full of people and one local, who told us his own version of the story. Pittsburgh legend says that this road has been haunted by cults, witches, and ghosts for the past 50 years or more. Watch the video to see how the story and emotions progress!

 

PART II.

After our drive down Blue Mist Road we started to think about the emotional impact of context and environment. Could we change the way people talk about inexplicable stories by setting up a space that changes the mood? How much does environment impact believeability ?

 

 

Narrowing the question down:

How does context and environment influence the believeability or emotional impact of inexplicable stories?

 

To begin our research, we set up an eerie space in a small room. We put candles on the floor and turned the lights out. Then we invited two people in and Alie began to tell a made-up story about the space we were in. These are the reactions and stories that followed...

After presenting our experiences at Steel City Improv to the class on Monday, we decided to continue exploring the ideas behind improv, particularly how we can help designers brainstorm more creatively using improv as a tool.

This lead to our “what” question of: “How can we make the brainstorming process more fun and effective for designers?”

We decided to specifically target designers (and other people they may work with, such as programmers and engineers), and so we could conduct test experiments in studios on campus doing improv activities such as “Scenes from a hat.” 

We started to list out all the things you have to think about when it comes to designing something. Stemming from the first step of “defining a problem,” to the basics of “establishing users,” and “social context,” and deeper steps like “naming,” and “marketability.” We grouped these steps into chronological, “like” categories, and started to label improv activities that could be utilized to help the design process in these steps.

We started to outline, from start to finish, how we would execute these test experiments with our volunteer subjects. The example problem/prompt we defined was “grocery store checkout process,” and from there, devised how our test sessions would run, and what improv tools & activities we would have our subjects partake in to help them creatively re-design the checkout process.

 

^ Utilizing the warm-up exercises we did at Steel City Improv to break the ice among the stranger subjects, and get their creative “gears grinding.”

^ Designing how our “scenes from a hat” activity would run, and how they would de-brief after each activity to discuss the ideas that came up during the activity.

 

 

^ Recognizing the importance of still using “traditional” brainstorm methods such as drawing and storyboards, as well as using more improv “name games” to help with the marketing aspects of design.

However, even after all of this careful planning, after talking with Kristin about our “designers improv” idea, we started to realize that our idea itself, was straying away from our original idea of making brainstorming fun. There was so much careful planning that was complicating our original idea of fun, that we started to feel more and more detached from this idea. Additionally, we all recognized the fact that role-playing is already very much an established tool for designers and brainstorming, and that our time and efforts might be best utilized going in another direction.

 

We listed out things that just interested us in general, from the idea of spontaneity, to the use of photography, to the idea of self-image. After a few hours of brainstorming and throwing around random ideas, we started to become more interested in the idea of connecting CMU students. I think that most CMU students would agree that our campus is a pretty divided one. Friend groups are pretty restricted to a person’s major or activities, and there isn’t much opportunity for interaction because of everyone’s busy schedules and work ethics. One of the words we pulled at the beginning of the lab was “comedy” (hence, our improv experience), and so we started to play with this idea of comedy/humor, and how it could be utilized to connect CMU students.

This idea, along with our recent discovery of the new effects on PhotoBooth, lead us to the idea of OMG CMU. Since humor is a great way to connect people, why not connect CMU students based off strictly “CMU humor.” We all go to the same places on campus, and have relatively similar mindsets in terms of our work ethics, so much that one can view these similarities in a comedic light. Also, who wouldn’t love to take a little work break for a good laugh?

Our new question: How can humor be used as a way to connect strangers on Carnegie Mellon’s campus?

 

Our initial venture into Improv was an interesting one. Both of us are not particularly extroverted people. Acting in front of people seemed pretty terrifying. But we also had a strange desire to do something that made us step outside our comfort zone. It turns out that we had very little to worry about. The other participants were all really nice and supportive. It turns out that connecting with strangers via comedy is a lot easier than we thought ...