Hello everyone! Welcome to our development blog. We are Team August Wilson Cycle, a group of 5 students at CMU ETC and Drama School. We are working with August Wilson House, a non-profit organization dedicated to the revitalization of August Wilson’s childhood home and its surrounding Hill District neighborhood in the city of Pittsburgh.
Under the pandemic circumstances, our team should work fully remotely across different time zones. It will be a big challenge to our team throughout the semester and our first mission was to find the best meeting time for everyone and set up our workflow and ground rules.
We kicked off our project smoothly with our faculty and clients. Our advisors are Mike and Ralph, and they met us to give a general overview of the project and our clients. We scheduled our weekly instructor meeting to occur each Monday at 10:00 am.
After that, we met our client from August Wilson House, Chris Rawson, and Richard Butler. They provided ample resources about August Wilson and project guidance! We set our meeting schedule with our clients, instructors, and John on every Thursday at 11:00 am.
Thanks to our faculty and clients, our team was able to understand our project requirements and mission through all meetings we had.
Then, let’s take a look at our initial project description.
[Project Description]
Client: Paul Ellis, Executive Director, AWH
With the opening of the August Wilson House a year and a half out, we are in search of an application that can be deployed prior to the opening that will engage guests remotely and build anticipation around this project. The platform on which the “app” is built should be flexible / customizable enough to support future experiences for guests visiting the physical site upon completion. Keeping true to the nature surrounding August Wilson’s Pittsburgh, it is generally understood that guests and visitors will experience all sites mapped throughout the Hill District. It is expected that those exploring the house and neighborhood will do so on their own devices (e.g. smartphones and/or tablets). Whether it is exploring the intended house restoration, encountering the Hill of past and present, putting yourself on stage in one of August Wilson’s plays, or transporting yourself to a different time and place, what unique and immersive experience might augmented reality provide our guests? Leaning on the current trends of interactive experiences, what joyful and inspiring moments can be created, captured, and shared by guests?
We can see some important keywords here.
‘Engage guests remotely’, ‘platform: App’, ‘Hill District’, ‘encountering the Hill of past and present’, ‘immersive experience’, ‘Augmented reality’.
Due to the social distancing policy, we cannot expect our guests to visit the physical site in the Hill District and use our application on that. Instead of leveraging physical sites, we decided to focus on designing a fully remote experience rather than a location-based experience.
[Research]
Before jumping into brainstorming, our team decided to do research about August Wilson and have time to educate ourselves first. We all chose different parts of the research topic and shared our research findings in the team meeting.
– About August Wilson’s Life (Hyoeun)
– About his work (Em)
– About Hill District (Shera)
– About Tech options (Zoltan)
– About reference projects (Gloria)
We watched the movie ‘Fences’, PBS documentary ‘The Ground on Which I Stand’, and lots of his interview clips to understand his identity as a playwright and his inspirations related to Hill District.
It was a great start and we are ready to start our Week 2.