Get Together
Get Together, my final project at CIID, is now online. Thanks to everyone who helped along the way, whether it was acting in my videos, participating in my research experiments or putting up with a bombardment of text messages. And thanks to everyone that visited our end of year exhibition!
Keyless: The Movie is a tribute to all my classmates and the number of video scenarios we created over the past year. But mostly it’s a bunch of inside jokes ;)
Enjoy!
I’ve been working hard on Get Together, a service I am designing for my final project at CIID. Here is a short video I produced as a prototype exploring the whole service from start to finish. Since creating this video I have begun refining the service and designing high res interfaces for all the touchpoints which will be used in a video scenario. I have also been working on setting up a basic group SMS system as a way to prototype the user experience.
More to come very soon…
Following up on the previous post about CIID at the Reboot Festival in Copenhagen, this video is an example of the kind of prototyping we were doing for Reboot participants.
Nina, Ashwin and I helped Tor Nørrentranders, one of the festival’s keynote speakers, prototype a way for children to ask him science questions over the web. Tor is well known in Denmark for his children’s books which illustrate some of life’s bigger questions (why is the sky blue?) in a child friendly way. Now Tor is interested in using video and the web so that children can send him questions directly.
Building on last weekend’s “Dispatch” experiment, I initiated another design probe which I also turned into a short video. This experiment, which took place on Saturday, started when I sent two text messages to 21 of my classmates and a few of our friends.
The first text from my personal mobile:
Dear Party People, I need your help with another experiment. For the rest of the day, please do not contact eachother directly. Instead, send an SMS to xxxx-xxxx and I will forward your message to the whole group. P.S. I heard about a party tonight, I will send details later.
And then a text from an old mobile phone (xxxx-xxxx referred to above):
Welcome to the Pilot Year Dispatch Line. To unsubscribe, reply with the word “bail”. Tak!
For the rest of the night, I used my mobile phones to manage a pretend service that allows friends to share updates with each other. I unsubscribed people, sent confirmation responses, and forwarded each persons message to the whole group. As it turned out, I did not choose the best night to conduct this experiment because most people stayed in (although I wonder if conducting this experiment actually caused people to stay in). Like the last experiment however, it proved a good way to gain insights about people’s behaviors when it comes to using their mobiles as a tool to communicate and coordinate within a group friends.
You can watch the video above to see what happened or keep reading to see a log of all the correspeondance…
Logging calls and texts durings Friday night's experiment
Shown here is a short video recorded on Friday night when I conducted a small experiment involving my classmates, their mobile phones, and a party we attended.
This is the email I sent that afternoon before making the video:
Dear Party People,
Are you planning on going to the house warming party at
Skabelonloftet? If so, can you all help me with an
experiment for my final project?What I have in mind is a small game with two very simple
rules:1. You can not call or text anyone on this email list except
for me2. You can not receive any calls or texts from anyone on
this email list except for meI will act as an “operator” by keeping track of everyone’s
dispatches. You can call or text me to leave an update
about yourself, or to inquire about the latest update from
a particular person.See you at the party tonight (i hope)!
Adam
There was no real objective for doing this other than seeing how the evening would be different when friends could not as easily contact each other. In the end, it really was not any different at all except for maybe people putting in a little more thought about where & when to meet. What was interesting though was that a few people broke the rules which they originally accepted from me. For example, Mimi got on a wrong bus which she perceived as a “little emergency” and felt the need to inform Nina immediately. Meanwhile, Magnus arrived at the party earlier than everyone else and out of discomfort (or boredom) decided to call people directly to urge them to hurry up.
It was also interesting being the hub for everyone, which made me realize just how much back-and-forth communication goes into something like meeting at a party. Keep reading for a transcription of all the SMS and calls I received…
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There is actually nothing exciting about this video, but I enjoyed it for what it is — a really nice example of video ethnography. We have tried this a couple times, but it is a lot harder than it looks. Even if you can get someone to agree to being interviewed in front of a video camera, you still have to worry about eliciting responses that are somewhat clear and to the point otherwise editing a video as watchable as this one is really difficult.
On the Artefact website they have published the first of three articles about how to film customer insights.
This is going to be a 3 part series on how you can film participants as part of a customer insights deliverable. This is a specific type of output that does 3 things for us:
- Greater client engagement by selling high level insights from the participant themselves
- Greater audience immersion (designers and clients) in the research without the paperwork
- Greater distribution and communication because of its sharable format