Creating an interactive experience for a global client
Overview
This was my most challenging project yet! The project's environment was based on working with students from other countries - named Project Oriented Learning Environment (POLE). The goal was to network our own expertise with other professions and to work together across culture and language borders. I met my teammates for a week then everything else was done virtually.
Challenge
With our team, we needed to create an interactive exhibit for our client, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) of the United Nations. The exhibit must be related to the Internet of Things and with the exception on the teams meeting for a week, everything else would be virtual.
What
Exhibition Design/Service Design/Industrial Design
Taught at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago & University of Applied Sciences of Northwestern Switzerland, Windisch (Switzerland)
18 weeks, 180 hours total
Approach
Internet of Things Research
We used a design tool called Affinity Mapping to help us organize data into different groups based on their natural relationships.
Examples of IoT devices categorized on the whiteboard
Team Formation
We first met our teams at the base university of this entire project, the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland in Windisch, Switzerland. All the teams were named after scientists and our team was named after Alan Turing.
Based on an animated movie, students were told to paint their expressive thoughts about the movie. Then students surrounded all the paintings on the floor to arrange them in groups based on similarities.
Teams were created by picking out students from each group of paintings so that each team member has a different perspective for the project.
The paintings that were created before are now spread out on the floor to be grouped together
Ideation Process
We needed to come up with an idea for our exhibit but we didn't know where to start. We needed to visualize our thoughts so we started to sketch, draw, color and doodle out any idea we had take related to Internet of Things.
Then we categorized our ideas to five different topics: Privacy-related, Humanity, Simplify everyday life, Knowledge Sharing and Economy in Future. We voted with stickers for the top three and they were Humanity, Privacy and Knowledge Sharing.
Next we branched out anything related to each of the three topics.
Outcomes
Making of the Exhibit
After thorough research and feedback, we chose to work on privacy (on social media particularly) as our theme for our interactive exhibit. We felt that it is crucial for the public to learn about the differences between being transparent and being private on any huge public online platform so we started working on an exhibit that displays just that. The exhibition has two parts to it:
Learn How It Feels To Be Transparent: Visitors will have their photo taken and captured in our IoT devices. The goal is to answer our survey questions to understand how transparent the visitors’ lives are. Depending on whether the visitor answers the questions relating to being transparent or being private, the photo will either become sharpen or blurred on our devices and visitors learn about their impact on social media. Their photos will disappear completely once visitors are done with the survey.
Relate To Our Persona: Team Turing has presented a timeline of the daily activities that an average person does. Under the timeline we will show activities of the cloud while a person is online.
Exhibition Design Tools Used
Affinity Mapping
Hardware: Webcam, Projector/TV, Smartphone
Software: Front-end/Back-end web development, Processing Software, Persistent Business Logic
Personal Reflections
My overall experience can be summed up by what my fellow teammate, Mirjana said, “It’s really great how we complete each other!” With different time zones especially when countries were experiencing daylight savings, we were still able to communicate with each other in one way or the other. As our team spoke 4 different languages, communication was initially challenging but we soon discovered the globally known language – hand gestures- to help us along the way!
Sketching out our ideas
Voting for our three project topics
Writing out anything related to the topics
Which each survey response, the visitor's photo sharpens or blurs
Timeline showing an average person's daily activities above the slider and the data that is collected based on those activities below the slider