Investigation 1 - Warmup Exercise
Investigation 1 - Warmup Exercise
Context
Alternative product pages on Amazon, customer reviews of imaginary or speculative devices, and app pages have all been useful strategies and formats. They allow you to see how imagined devices could be marketed to users – what features might adverts and product pages highlight and why. Equally they offer small glimpses as to how a user might encounter these objects, what they might appreciate, and what frictions or tensions might result: presenting one star and five star reviews allow those to be quickly imagined and explored.
This example comes from a recent paper “Diversifying the Domestic: A Design Inquiry into Collective and Mobile Living” where the authors interviewed a range of people living in non-normative homes and then imagining how smart home appliances could be reinterpreted to fit the needs and expectations of non-traditional domestic spaces.
Above: The RoomiRoomba from William Odom, Sumeet Anand, Doenja Oogjes, and Jo Shin. 2019. Diversifying the Domestic: A Design Inquiry into Collective and Mobile Living. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ‘19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1377–1390. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3323687
Another comes from the Near Future Laboratory’s An Ikea Catalog From The Near Future. They explain (emphasis added): “Using our approach called Design Fiction we ran a workshop and produced an Ikea Catalog from the near future. We did this as a way of digging into the details, discussing the known topics and raising many more unknown ones. We used the Ikea Catalog as a Design Fiction artifact for its compelling ways to represent normal, ordinary, everyday life in many parts of the world. contains the routine furnishings of a normative everyday life. The result is a container of life’s essentials and accessories which can be extrapolated from today’s normal into tomorrow’s normal.”
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Above: Excerpt from the Near Future Laboratory’s An Ikea Catalog From The Near Future
Brief
Drawing inspiration from these two examples, render a possibility for your animistic object. Use the format of a product page, customer review, or catalog to speculate on how someone might encounter your intelligent object? How would it be explained? How would they react? How would it meet them in their homes or lives in mundane or unexpected ways? What would happen as a result?
The speculative concept should be based on the three assigned elements (object, input and output).
Use this to thing through and communicate the unexpected behaviors you hope to create in this project
Sketch this possible approach to your creative project, in under 2 hours.
Learning Objectives
As part of this exercise you will be asked to:
- Creatively explore the possibilities for your project to get early feedback
- Gain hands on experience with methods for rendering speculative proposals and concepts
- Explore the kinds of dialog and unexpected experiences you could create through this project
Deliverables
You are asked to deliver three things for this warm up exercise:
- Mental Model or Materialization: Delivered with digital documentation (photographs, sketches, etc.) on Slack or bring to class
- Narrative: A short description of the manner in which you approached the project, the process you followed and the strategies you used.
- Reflection: A reflection on outcome, and comparision to findings of the Petrelli paper discussed in class.
The narrative and reflection should be approx 150-200 words (max.)
Share your outcomes as a post on the #projects channel of on Slack.