Week 1: Setting Up

After returning from a trip to the West Coast, our six-person team set to work designing a new story creating exhibit for the San Antonio Children’s Museum. This exciting first week was filled with setting up, blue sky brainstorming, and establishing expectations with our clients, the San Antonio Children’s Museum and Argyle Designs, a designer of museum experiences.

Our multi-talented team includes artists, engineers, writers, and educators. Designer John Baxa has a background in developmental psychology and has worked in kids’ media research for companies including MTV and Nickelodeon. Austin Booker, designer, is a sculptor with experience teaching art to children and developing educational material for museums. Designer Katie Correll is a roboticist who has worked on puppets for Broadway and children’s entertainment. Programmer Jason Guo has designed three games for educational purposes. Sophia (Fan) Su is a programmer and artist. David Wegbreit, producer, is a writer who most recently developed family financial education products for Independent Means Inc.

Our first challenge was to establish a workspace, converting a room that had once been used by Carnegie Mellon to test games into a functional, comfortable, and welcoming office space. We wanted the layout of our room to suggest what we need to do: gather and share ideas, meet with clients and faculty, work individually, and play together. Readers can explore an interactive panorama of our workspace here.

We also sought a team name that conveyed playfulness and openness while expressing our mandate to build an innovative story creating machine for children. We decided to call ourselves “dotdotdot,” as in how a child might describe an ellipsis, the open space where new stories can begin, as in “Once upon a time…” John Baxa translated this into a logo and visual identity above.

With a wide initial pitch from our client, we began broad idea gathering and research, thinking about what works in museums and different ways stories could be created and manipulated. We looked at tactile interfaces that inspired and engaged and curated a gallery of the coolest things in interaction design. We also started the first of what will be a series of playtests of existing storytelling games, checking out the children’s game Tell Tale. This weekend, we continue our research with a trip to Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Finally, we wrapped our week with our first virtual meeting with our clients where we discussed project aims and established a framework for going forward.