Bachelor Project - Interaction Design
Framed in Child-Computer Interaction
Concept name Suitcase Time-Travellers
Group project Credit for contributions to Benjamin, Emma and Peter.
Scope Over a period of 15 weeks, in cooperation with Marienhoffskolen, in Denmark, and a 5th grade class with 19 children aged 10-12.
Introduction Verbal communication skills is found to be an important skill to learn and practice for children, based on previous research and gathered insights. Suitcase Time-Travelers is a mixed-reality, asymmetrical game based on negotiation and perspective-taking in order to scaffold verbal communication for children in middle school.
Research question “How can interactive technology and asymmetric roles assist children with practicing verbal communication skills?”
On basis of this, the concept of Suitcase Time-Travellers was developed.
My main role was that of the theory- and methods book enthusiast, calling for participatory design approaches and reflecting on how to appropriate techniques, methods and theories to reach our goals for the project.
I was especially involved in the physical manifestation of the prototype and took part of most other aspects except setting up the webserver and coding, which Benjamin took care of - Thank you for your coding-skills Benjamin :)
Scroll down to see the process of this project!
The final concept
With basis in mixed-reality, asymmetric roles, negotiation and perspective taking, the final concept was a game intended to scaffold verbal communication for children in middle school.
It is a two-player co-op game, with clearly defined, but interdependent roles: The Explorer and the Operator.
The Explorer is given a VR-headset and is shown a 360° picture, where different items are located, which the player must search for and describe to their Operator.
This is done so the Operator can solve riddles using the manual and tangible interface.
To set the stage for the players, a narrated video introduces them to the story with the mission and oncoming puzzles, before they embark on their journey through historical settings, including Ancient Egypt and 15th century Italy.
It has a series of stages within the game, where the players are interdependent on each other's actions, succeeding through verbal communication and tangible interactions.
Tools
I primarily used Adobe XD, inDesign, Illustrator and LightBurn with a laser cutter.
A design process model of four stages were used
Exploration, ideation, prototyping and evaluation with the inherent appropriation of methods, techniques and theories.
Throughout the process presented below, problems were overcome through reflective thinking, collaboration and reframing insights into opportunities.
The final prototype at the final evaluation.
Weaknesses of the project:
The project was lacking in some specific parts, especially the statistical data gathering of the participating children’s level of communication skills prior, during and after the use of the design object.
This would have demanded more resources and were outside the time scope of the project, but could have given a stronger foundation for proving or disproving the success of the concept.
Exploration
Main problem We are not experts in the field of designing interactive technologies for children.
How did we solve it? Based on our time constraints I recommended my team to reframe this issue into an opportunity to run a discovery cycle to learn more about what it means to develop interactive technologies for children. The cycle was somewhat limited in time and scope, and we decided to do a mix of foundational theoretic research into children development vs. age, and qualitative research methods from experts in the field and domain experts from schools.
DSD cards
Since neither of the design team members could be considered experts within the field of children’s developmental abilities, skills and limitations, DSD cards by Bekker & Antle (2011) were used. These, together with literature, supported the appropriation of different methods to optimize designing for children.
Interviews
Semi-constructed Interviews were planned and conducted with relevant personnel at the cooperating school, as well as an expert within the field of working with technology and children.
Define - analysis
The gathered data were analyzed and converted into usable insights through a series of methods, including thematic analysis of transcribed data, personas, problem statement and PoV-framework.
While these PoV’s were based on expert interviews and proxies for the participating kids, it was deemed sufficient for the scope of this project.
Ideation
Main problem We are not experts in the way children think about storytelling, games and ways of interacting with technology.
How did we solve it? This was an incredibly fun exercise of appropriating different known effective methods, into a participatory design method that worked in our context. We prepared a lot, and got great insights from the children, effectively finding out how they articulated stories, tasks, collaboration and controls that made sense to them.
Brainstorming
The accumulated insights from the exploration stage were reframed into a concept through a series of activities, including internal brainstorming and sketching sessions. As a way of launching ideation, the “How Might We” (HMW) method was used to kick-start the process. This design thinking method builds on the PoV method and the framed problem statements.
The method was a means for us as designers to break up our current problem space into smaller bits, and by these, ask questions which opens up the solution space, giving a more actionable foundation for accommodating our problem statements. For every one of the PoV statements a minimum of five HMW questions were formulated, all trying to cover various aspects which could inspire new potential solutions.
Workshop
For this ideation workshop, the team found inspiration for two methods and appropriated these into a combined one, to accommodate the goal of the workshop. These were “The Mission from Mars” method created by Dindler & Iversen (2007) and our second inspiration was the KIE-model, which is a pedagogic and didactic tool for structuring innovative learning in primary school education (Funch & Kromann-Andersen, 2009).
The workshop aim was to create stories, expressed in the low-fidelity prototype storyboards created with a variety of materials: storyboard templates in A3 format, printed out clippings of diverse characters, settings and objects, scissors, glue, colored pencils and storyboard examples for inspiration. The other aim of the workshop was to mock up tangible operating system setups and the materials for this ended up including cardboard, glue, colored pencils and wood carvings in different sizes and shapes, most of them carved by using a laser cutter.
Workshop result
The outcomes of the workshop were afterwards analyzed by the design team through individual reflections and thoughts regarding the workshop.
These were divided into categories to structure our focus. These individual insights were then discussed in the design team, where the most prominent insights were categorized in an Affinity Diagram in relation to the DSD cards.
The result was strong insights regarding the narrative of the concept and which tangible interactions fit the participants mental models. The concept got reiterated with these in mind, moving from ideation further into solution sketching and prototyping.
Prototyping and evaluation v1
Lo-fi
The team conducted a crazy 8 session, to quickly manifest conceptual ideas through sketching. The goal was to start developing ideas, and to visualize each designer’s thoughts and interpretation of the creations to find common ground.
These ideas were based on the results from the ideation phase and co-design workshop, in relation to possible solution-technology. VR environment as technical domain kept coming back as a possible way of creating interdependency.
Sketching continued, paper prototypes of controls were made, testing internally and with other students. Once sufficient, higher fidelity iterations were made.
Higher fidelity
Through this iterative process, the elements were combined into a functional, interactive prototype.
This prototype consisted of a simple VR-environment created in Photoshop and converted into a webapp that could be accessed with a smartphone. The control panel for the explorer were functional but lacking aesthetically.
The two narrative based levels, were foundational frames for how the prototype should be created, as two versions of both the VR-environment and the Manual was made, in order to ensure that both participants could try the different roles of Operator and Explorer, and that we could try slightly different ideas of the same concept of “describe the object”.
Evaluation
Evaluations were conducted throughout the prototyping phase, but specifically two evaluations with participants gave key insights into improving the prototype. The first of these gave insights which made the team come up with the idea of a time-travel suitcase as basis for the physical manifestation of the final iteration.
Prototyping and evaluation v2
Graphical interfaces
VR-environment
Both of the game levels now had more detailed objects that looked more like each other, in order to make them more difficult to describe. Further improvements were made in moving instructions and some other features out to the screen - for initial introduction to both players.
Adobe XD manual
For the second prototype the Manual manifested itself in the same physical material as for the first, namely the iPad and with Adobe XD for creating the content. We added more interactivity and depth to the manual, meeting some requirements of more interactivity.
Final prototype
Putting all the lasercut pieces together with the suitcase
Before last touches of hiding cables (and realizing that clear signifiers should be added…)
For the second prototype, the design team shifted their attention to the Operator’s experience of the prototype. This attitude was used when molding the Operator’s setup of a combined control panel.
Final evaluation
The final evaluation were focused around the experience of the prototype, with its learnability and the underlying practice of verbal communication of the participants.
The second evaluation were to be carried out with the same children, the same location and with the same structure as the first evaluation. The evaluation would mostly be diagnostic evaluation with a formative foundation, in order to find aspects of the concept which needed to refinement and further development.
The feedback from the participants and our observations showed that asymmetric interdependence, combined with VR and tangible interactions in a narrative and immersive setting, could possibly assist children in their practice of verbal communication skills, albeit limited by lacking measurements of before and after comparisons.
Result of the project
Answering a research question like ours with certainty would require a project of an entirely different scale, with vast amounts of time, resources and methods, framed for measuring verbal communication skills of children before and after the study, in order to back up any valid claims.
Be that as it may, the observations and feedback from the children clearly showed a compelling amount of verbal communication as a result of interacting with the designed object. We would therefore argue that asymmetric interdependence, combined with VR and tangible interactions in a narrative and immersive setting, could be a possible way for asymmetric roles and interactive technologies to assist children in their practice of verbal communication skills, albeit limited by lacking measurements of before and after comparisons.
