While there are inherent risks associated with social networking and communicating anonymously online via forums and newsgroups, they provide a low-risk sandbox to ask questions, share ideas and learn about new interests and ways of doing things. While the majority of people are happy to learn or engage in new activities by joining clubs and associations, not everyone finds social interaction fun and energizing and need time to recharge after prolonged socializing. It seems that the more communication technology advances, the more it’s moving toward removing pressure from social interactions. The invention and wide spread introduction to the telephone began this by allowing people to conduct regular conversations over large distances. This was continued and greatly accelerated with the popularity of the internet. As instant/text messaging became more popular, it became easier for people who possibly came across as socially awkward or inept  to have access to a means of real-time communication which affords them time to carefully consider a question and the wording of their response. With the advent of sites such as Twitter and Tumblr, this has been taken to a new level where “conversation” takes on a whole new form and there is no obligation to respond to a message that has been sent out if a conversation is initiated, nobody would think twice about one person simply ceasing to reply.

“she described herself as “hyper-social.” In fact, the only time she admitted feeling less than socially fluent was during her offline hours.” – Cassie Stewart

This convention of a conversation being something that you can simply opt out of at any time without it being any form of social faux pas creates an ideal environment for introverts. This is not to say that all introverts love, and engage in, social media, but for many an environment where interactions are based around the exchange of information rather than small talk and social niceties can be very appealing. Around the time of starting high school, this is exactly what began to draw me to blogs, message boards and newsgroups; the attraction of being able to learn, experiment and discuss at my leisure almost constantly without the drain of verbal discussion.

While group work environments such as idea generation and brainstorming can be an exhausting and even dreaded activity for some people, technology is beginning to alleviate this pressure as well. I’ve found more and more recently, that even when working in a group of people all in the same physical location, the group will elect to discuss ideas via a social network or a piece of collaborative software such as Google Docs. Even to the point where two seperate discussions develop within the group – one building gradually from group members adding to and modifying each other’s work online while they freely discuss the project in a more general sense or mulling over more complicated ideas which would possibly take too long to textually debate.

These advances in the social capabilities of technology, despite doing a large amount for connecting people, arguably achieve quite the contrary. It is becoming commonplace for people to be continually interacting and in many cases, even reliant on it to the point where they will use their phone to message someone whilst holding a verbal conversation.

The advances in social technology are making it much easier for people to communicate, socialize and find with people who share common interests, as well as allowing people who may find themselves feeling awkward in social situations to familiarize themselves with new people so that they do not feel as awkward when it comes to conversation in person. However, the ability to socialize in such a detached, laid back manner is beginning to detract from every day conversation to the point where people are communicating less and less, opting instead to hold conversations with people online. It will be interesting to see if this phenomenon gets worse as technology advances further or if people will begin to move away from their technologically dependent lives.

Stop Talking @ Me – Lara Zarum
http://www.thegridto.com/city/opinion/stop-talking-me/

After Effects was used to overlay the interface using a difference matte to detect when the people in the interviews moved in front of the display and a track mask in order to hide the relevant parts of the display.

People-Aware Labels from DeadPixel on Vimeo.

Our next step was to create an experience that would give the user as good an insight as possible into how the final product would function. We made use of an unused whiteboard to simulate a display case in the museum and a number of physical objects from around our studios. A scale model was combined with physical objects in order to provide the most immersive user experience using as few resources as possible.

A more temporary version of our prototype for display at the McManus Museum.

Our paper prototype used folding pieces of paper attached to a board and a “Wizard of Oz” approach, where one of our team would manipulate the elements of the interface depending on the user’s actions to simulate the way the labels would expand when users were nearby. To compliment our physical prototype, we also had a basic electronic version which would detect user’s faces and expand the correct label.

While a combination of the two gave a good idea of the system we had in mind, in future if I was going to do a demonstration at a remote location it it would be far better to visit the location beforehand and set up. Having a scale prototype certainly improved the experience but it created quite a few problems when moving to a different location.

Building a paper prototype helped us get an early idea of how we wanted the system to function and what some of the drawbacks were to a number of the ideas we had formed. Some of the most positive feedback we received on our prototype was the use of physical objects to simulate the exhibits to keep the prototype as real to life as possible and it’s something that I’ll definitely keep in mind when I come to creating my next one. It would have been all to easy to take the term “Paper prototype” literally, and build upon a small sheet of paper. By interpreting it more loosely and using the whiteboard, we came up with a far more interesting early example.

We began by splitting into groups of two again for 10 minute brainstorming sessions. Each pair would select two insight cards that we had generated in our previous groups and begin to think of and take note of ideas based on those insights. The notes were to be as visual as possible and involve minimum text. I selected a comic book/storyboard type of approach, sketching each idea in a box.

The idea was to generate ideas rapidly and aim to generate 10 ideas in the 10 minutes allotted. We found one idea per minute to be quite challenging and in the end only came up with 8.

We Then selected one of these ideas and began to start building upon it and creating a number of variations of it.

This exercise was repeated, alternating the pairs people were in and all came together after each brainstorming session to compare and discuss ideas. It was interesting to see how different the ideas generated were when discussing with different people. Even if one of the insights they were based on was similar to one used by your previous pair.

Following the brainstorming sessions, the pairs were changed again and we began to select a final concept to carry forward for prototyping. I was paired with Victor Loux and we decided on a concept around augmenting the display case. We decided on this as we found the idea interesting and each had a concept which were similar and overlapped in that area.

We began by drawing up a very rough storyboard of 6 frames to illustrate the basic functions of the system along with a wireframe to show how the layout of the interface would look.

During a peer crit of the initial storyboards, it was commented that many of our frames had very long captions which were describing the frame rather than complimenting them. Another comment was that there were perhaps missing stages in the storyboards, such as a view of the interface and and over-the-shoulder shot to give a better sense of the user’s experience.

I found the storyboarding exercise extremely useful. I’ve always heard that taking visual notes is a far better way of making information stick and presenting it in general, but I’ve always gone overboard with the drawings when I tried it previously. After seeing how clearly information can be conveyed even with the most simple, badly drawn of sketches, my notes have become far more visual.

Having touched briefly on user research and storyboarding in previous modules, I was excited to hear that we’d be spending an entire module learning in-depth how to do it. Our previous project to design a social network had involved a substantial amount of user research, but most of that took place online, gathering data from user profiles and posts. There were still aspects of it that hadn’t quite clicked for me.

We started by visiting the McManus Gallery in Dundee to observe the visitors there and document their interactions with their surroundings and trends in their behaviour. This was done in groups of two or three and I paired with Amy McCrae. While people-watching is something that I find interesting and do quite often, it took some time to get used to taking notes on people’s behaviour over time without making them uneasy. I found a good way to deal with this in the beginning was to simply find a quiet spot to sit, take notes and observe different people as they passed by rather than worrying about a specific group’s journey around the gallery. This tactic paid off as there was a larger group of elderly people who took plenty of time viewing the exhibits which gave us a good chance to practise observing the same people over time. They were even kind enough to speak to us and answer some questions about their experience and accessibility  as a number of them had trouble reading the captions for the exhibits.

We then came together in the Gallery café and compared and swapped notes, as well as giving feedback on each other’s observations. This was a good chance to hear about behaviour in sections of the museum we had not had time to visit yet.

It was interesting to observe how people interact differently with the same objects and space, depending on their age and disabilities or even just due to their differing personalities. The visit has definitely caused me to think differently about how people move and act when going about their business and should hopefully make for some interesting insights inside and outside of the project.

When it came to branding, we employed a low impact colour scheme of whites and grays, along with a textured background to support the theme of showcasing materials. We selected this clean, provocative design in order to avoid drawing focus from the content.

We composed the layout of the site to draw attention to the images by having a large, clear collage of images occupying a large portion of the page. Throughout the pages on the social network, images comprise large portions of the screen, supported on some of them by an attractive map.

The concept initially called for a simple Google maps map. However, we felt that employing the raw Google maps API would impose branding of its own, as it’s such a well known application. After quite a bit of research, we came across an overlay for Google maps which provided the maps with a watercolour visual which we felt better complimented our site’s aesthetic.

A token array of icons appear throughout the site to represent each material and provide a simple and visually appealing visualization of the type of content being viewed at a quick glance.

Having finished researching the potential usergroups, we began to formulate possible concepts for the project. We initially came up with three concepts, Recraft, Everlovin’ and Biobling.

During this stage, we began to encounter problems due to our very focused subject matter and usergroup. Each of our concepts ended up with one major feature, which was almost always encorporated into the lesser features of the other concepts.

This resulted in a revamp of our Biobling concept. A quick brainstorming session brought to light the fact that for a group of people interested in recycled materials, the location and sourcing of such materials was of major interest. This lead to the birth of the Materialistic concept, which would later be taken forward as our final product.

Having completed this stage in the project, it is clear that we would have benefited greatly from maintaining a far broader focus on the subject mater earlier in the research. Despite the fact that we had found a topic that we were happy with and that we believed to be fitting, it eventually became clear that we could develop a far richer application by working with a broader usergroup.

It quickly became apparent that our topic of upcycled jewellery would prove too specific when it came to gathering content. This caused us to widen our focus to ecological and environmentally-friendly jewellery in general.

We then began to brainstorm for possible concepts for our social network. During this time, I started learning not to focus on the main content – the jewellery – and start to think about the other aspects. I gave more and more thought to the materials behind the products and how people treated them. A pattern emerged that some designers would heavily favour certain materials and work with them frequently (Or in some cases, exclusively).

As part of our Designing Social Networks module, the class has split into groups of three and begun to think about subjects related to design to center our social networks around. Our group consists of Amy McCrae, Stephen Macvean and myself.

We began by listing as many different subject areas as we could. Starting off broadly, we then began to select ones we considered to be interesting or likely to yield good content and extended them to include sub-categories and related subjects.

Eventually, we each came to select an area of research to focus on. Amy chose upcycled jewellery, Stephen chose film photography and I chose interface design.

There were a number of subjects which were ruled out during brainstorming as we considered them to be too broad to consider and include each sub-category. Having worked through the following initial research, I feel now that starting by taking such broad subjects through to the initial research phase would have been beneficial. It would have allowed us to make a more informed decision when selecting a focus area, as it was, we each selected a couple of focused areas each, so that we had one to discard if information proved sparse.

Sources: Proving an interest
Having established an area of interest, we then searched for as many different places where people were sharing our chosen type of media as possible. Trolling through various websites to ascertain whether there was a potential user group and learning the types of media being shared.

Discussion: Depth of content
Having established that there was a base of relevant content, we then began to look more closely at how people were sharing this content and the types of social exchanges which accompanied this media.

After having met up to present out findings, interface design was ruled out as it was too broad and has a large number of pre-established social networks, leaving the choice between upcycled jewellery and film photography. Upcycled jewellery was eventually decided on as our final subject as we felt there was more of a niche and potential for a unique network.

Having misunderstood most of the stages of research, I learned a lot from watching other people’s presentations and looking at notes from the rest of the group.
I’m quite looking forward to the next project where I’ll have a chance to put what I’ve learned into action.

Image by geekcalendar on Flickr

Always take notes of everything and keep them!