Urban Games – Seminar

The group seminar this week was surrounding the topic of Urban Games and was hosted by my colleagues, Palash, Sreeju and Maja. Given the unprecedented success of Pokemon Go in recent times, the subject of urban games has continued to grow in popularity. The guys first presented on the history of urban games and how they were designed, describing a number of examples, such as ‘Can you see me now?” by Blast Theory, Ingress by Niantic and more modern concepts such as Father.IO. I found this to be one of the most memorable presentations we’ve had so far as it got me thinking of the future of gaming and how future technologies could impact it.

For the workshop, the guys had already told us to prepare by wearing suitable clothing for running around, not your usual workshop. The reason for this is because we were going to be participating in a game set within the CSIS building called Nemesis. The basic premise of the game was that the players would search for hidden treasures in the building and then have to try and eliminate each other by stealing their name tag.

The core rules of the game were as follows:

• The game will be an hour long.
• You will all play as individuals and will be each other’s opponents.
• Each player will have their name tag stuck on their back, 3 wristbands on any one of their wrists and will have a phone with the Nemesis group chat open at all times during the game. There are 50 treasure cards hidden throughout the building.
• You must take the tag off of someones back to eliminate them.
• Attacker will lose a wristband if the targeted player turns and takes a picture of the attacker and sends it to the Nemesis group chat. The moderator then decides if the attacker is to lose a wristband. If a player loses all wristbands, they get eliminated.
• For each tag collected except their own, a player gets +4 points. Each treasure card carries +1 points.
• There are 2 ways of winning this game, to collect the most points or to be the last person standing which means you have to eliminate each other.

Honestly, this game was a fantastic experience and the best way to spend a Thursday morning. Everyone seemed to have fun and took the game quite seriously. I also got to discover areas of the CSIS building that I had never seen before and I’ve been frequently in and out of this building for the past six years. At the end of the game, Gabriela suggested that we bring something like this outside during the summer which everyone appeared to be up for and I hope comes to fruition. Hats off to Palash, Sreeju and Maja for coming up with and being bold enough to carry out this game.

 

 

 

 

Urban Interaction Design – Seminar

Another Thursday, another seminar to be hosted by my colleagues. Today it was Monoj, Yeuting and Luoning who were presenting on the topic urban interaction design.

We began the day in a way that I think all 9am lectures should start, with balloons. For a quick task, we were split into two groups and we had to build a standing structure out of our balloons, the talent and most stable structure would win. Unfortunately, we lost but I still question the sorcery that the other team used to build their perfect balloon tower. Of course this task was not set to just wake us up but to introduce us to the importance of planning. As the old saying goes “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail”.

What then followed was a seminar on urban interaction design, a topic that I have become quite accustomed to hearing of throughout my time in college. The idea revolves around the interaction of human beings with their urban surroundings, in an attempt to make everyday urban experiences more pleasurable and efficient. This interesting concept has taken shape in many ways throughout the world and the guys were great in presenting some positive examples.

Then came time for the workshop, in which we were tasked with the planning of our own city, including where it was based, the streets, buildings and facilities. Was in a group with Sushmita and Palash. Thankfully, Palash seemed to have good knowledge of urban planning so we let him take the wheel on explaining the possible layout options for the city, for which we chose a grid layout as we saw this as the most efficient option. This allowed us to have greater control of the processes in the city, placing the farming sector on the outskirts and making the services sector easily accessible for the public.

It didn’t end once we had built our city, as we were then given to cards, one depicted a crisis scenario and the other providing us with the technology that we had to use to combat in some way. The problem that we were given was as follows:

There has been no rain for 3 months. Your city has nearly run out of water. The water supply will last another 10 days. The citizens are demanding a solution.

To solve this crisis, we has to use a mix of virtual and augmented reality. Not the easiest of tasks and we were a little lost when we fist started discussing the possibilities. After some time, we decided to implement a rain water harvesting plan for the city, in which units would be set up for the filtration and distribution of this water. We also set up a green tower that condenses moisture from the air and turns it into drinking water. To be more environmentally friendly, we decided to replace the selling of water bottles with water pellets, such as the Ooho water pellets.

But where does the technology come into play. Well, an AR based location system would be put in place, allowing members of the public to find their closest filtration and distribution unit. At these units, an interactive VR system would be out in place to educate people on the importance of conserving water. Along with this, VR units would be set up along the side of what is now a dry river bank, providing them with an image of what the river used to look like and hopefully making people more aware of the issues at hand.

The other groups had some really cool ideas as well and we all differed in our final city design as we had different crises to overcome. One city used wind turbines to combat hectic weather conditions and the other team dealt with a garbage crisis by using sensors, this city was also gold rich and had tunnels guiding rubbish to mt crumpit.. you read that right.

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Again, another great day that was successfully organised by the classmates. Opening my eyes to the potential that interaction design offers to the space between people and the environment they find themselves in.

 

UX to Behavior Management

It was our opportunity to run our own seminar and design workshop today. The topic that was chosen by myself, Emma and Yuan was ‘From User Experience Design to Behaviour Management’. This was a really interesting experience as the onus was on us to keep our colleagues interested in the topic at hand, something I think we managed to do by picking engaging and thought provoking content.

The presentation itself began by covering the background of UX design, a process of creating products that provide meaningful experiences, of course, this was done with a little help from Don Norman. This lead onto examples of what could be considered good UX design, something which was more difficult to discover than we thought. We then stretched out into persuasive design, a design practice that focuses on influencing human behavior, providing and describing both morally positive and negative examples of this. Ending on a positive note, we introduced calm technology, which takes technology out of the spotlight, only using it to amplify the best of humanity and technology. All the slides can be viewed below:

Following the lecture, we invited the class to participate in a redesign challenge. This challenge required the class to split into three groups, with each group being given a product that was very clearly ethically questionable. Their goal was to redesign, repackage and sell the product to the rest of the class.

Team one decided to alter the packaging of cigarettes by incorporating sunglasses in the design, attempting to make them appear “cool” to the consumer by rebranding them as a high end product, something you would be proud to open in front of your friends.

 

Team two took their 0% alcohol product to an interesting place by marketing it towards young males who want to be just like their father with the slogan ‘Man up’. I was surprised by the packaging and marketing of this product as the team made no attempt to hide their intentions, clearly conveying why a child would want this product through an in your face message.

Team three made their study pills to be an attractive option for students, distributing the product in different forms of packaging, such as sachets of powder and tic-tac like boxes. They clearly had the student in mind during the design process and the Owl they chose as a mascot was a decision that only continued to convey the fun and friendly aspect of the product. An interesting point to make about this design was how the team decided to ignore the negative effects of taking the pills, a very different approach to team two.

After this challenge, we split the class into two groups in order to debate an article that we had already asked the team to read. This article was about an experiment that Facebook had conducted with a number of users, one which sparked much criticism from members of the public due to the moral and ethical decisions behind the experiment. I wasn’t very confident that this debate would be very successful as I knew that many members of the class were in favour of the public, so much so that we had to draw straws for who would take what side. To my surprise, the debate was very successful as very member contributed, in spite of their true beliefs.

 

Circular Design

Today, Craig and Zhiyuan ran a seminar on Circular Design. I was really looking forward to see what the guys had prepared as I find this concept to be really interesting on a personal level.

Circular design is an ideation for a sustainable future that operates without waste, a future where every product is designed for multiple cycles of use, and manufacturing cycles are carefully aligned so that the output of one process always feeds to another. Traditionally, Designers are part of a linear ‘take-make-dispose’ economy, creating products from raw materials that would eventually end up in a landfill after they had been used. A new system that implements a circular design would combat this issue, as the products and materials could be reused in closed loops. This way, we can create a healthy economy that is inspired by and in balance with nature.

During the workshop, we delved into an activity that was created by the people at IDEO, in order to encourage corporate leaders to interconnect their business models. IDEO have been at the forefront of the trying to bring the transition to a circular economy into the mainstream.

For this activity, we split into groups of four, each person in the group were to imagine themselves as a company representative, this company could have been made up on the spot or taken from the real world.

Once we had chosen our companies, each representative had to pinpoint their companies assets and what they waste. The representatives would then collaborate with one another, finding ways for their companies to interconnect and create a new system that might make use of one or of the companies wasted materials, transforming them into useful assets for what may be seen as a sub-company.

The four companies represented in ur group were Uber, Microsoft, X Film (Video Creators) and EditFX Studios (Video Editors). The challenge facing the group was feedback loops (How might we make use of each other data to create new service offerings that improve the circularity of materials?’) As we had quite a diverse set of companies, in terms of size and assets, there was an interesting opportunity for collaboration.

What we came up with was a new educational system that allowed Uber partners to up skill in their downtime. This made use of the time that Uber partners spent without receiving a trip, the training video making skills of X Film, the spare equipment that EditFX Studios had at their disposal and the partners could develop skills and earn Microsoft accredited certificates. Their is not usually a shortage of Uber partners in signing to their platform, this system could allow their partners to develop their career in the path that they want, moving on to better things. The success of certain partners could then lead to more people wanting to partner with Uber in future, but not just for the means of making money.

Overall, I really enjoyed this seminar, it must have been quite daunting for Craig and Zhiyuan as they were first up out of the class, especially given that they were a person shorter than other groups. The pressure didn’t seem to effect them at all though as everything went off without a hitch, they even acted as participants during the workshop whist being facilitators.