The Lights Out project was pitched in Spring 2016 by students Andrew O’Rourke, Alex Amorati, Annie Wang, and Dasol Park with no client. It was carried out in Fall 2016 by Alex Amorati, Dasol Park, Annie Wang, and Dale Wones.

The premise of the project was that it was nonvisual, multisensory, and location-based. The semester was split into two parts:

1. 8 weeks of rapid prototyping in this strange design space and condensing our findings into one final design (delivering a Playtest Book)
2. 8 weeks of building out and testing a full experience to show at the ETC Festival and at conferences (delivering the experience)

We knew this was an aggressive schedule. From the beginning we agreed to focus on each sense in turn during testing, with increasing overlap and emphasis on story as we got closer to the end of testing. The final experience was meant to be relatively polished, but we were unable to accomplish the level of polish we would have preferred. All the same, the final experience and the playtest documentation show the design challenges we faced and how we made connections from individual playtests and research to the experience shown at Festival.

Our rapid prototyping was exhausting, but informative. During this half of the semester, we learned a lot about senses and guest expectations that helped us design for our final experience in the second half of the semester. Those findings can all be found in the Playtest Book. However, we also learned a lot about our process. We did well at cooperating and conforming to constraints (in terms of time, talent, and supplies). And we did very well at documentation, which allowed us to make the Playtest Book in the first place. However, we were brainstorming as a group and often without a specific goal, because our goals changed so frequently, and this made brainstorming a long and painful process most of the time. That, in turn, left us very little time to build what we needed for playtests and prepare to ask meaningful questions after the fact. Compounding this problem was that our already-aggressive schedule was further cut into by a lot of meetings and industry visits, which were cool and awesome! But they happened to fall very close together, making planning hard. We agreed as a group that moving forward we should set clearer goals as we tested, be more detailed in our designs, and plan further in advance in general.

The second half of the semester was just as exhausting but in a different way. Rather than having many different ideas and playtests, we had to focus on iterating on one idea to build and deliver for Festival. We got off to a late start by submitting our budget and getting it approved later than planned. However, we were able to keep to our schedule for the most part and had about 9 days to test and polish our experience between Soft Opening and Festival. We used that time to the fullest, because we were already used to making changes and building puzzles so rapidly from our first half. We stayed open to suggestions and constraints, which we think really helped us achieve a final experience that works for everyone. And we got outside help when we needed it – most notably from Heather Kelley and Miguel Reyes from BVRS (for research and subject expertise), Dave Purta (for wiring and building), and Alina Striner (for story and theming). We also planned ahead for Festival and two extra showing days so that these days went smoothly and the focus was on the experience and the guests.

We learned many lessons over the course of the semester, but we have identified as our most important:

1. To not depend on tech – we had the opportunity to use an electrostatic vibration screen from a research team on main campus. It is a touch screen that mimics different textures, which we thought would be cool to use for our experience. As it turns out, it made more sense for us to just use actual textures rather than a gadget.
2. To divide and conquer – this was touched on already, but brainstorming as a group (like we did for the first half) wasn’t nearly as effective as assigning different puzzles to different people (like we did in the second half) and entrusting everyone to do their part.
3. To never assume – guests will surprise you. We thought no one would eat anything without seeing it first, and we were wrong. Testing is crucial.
4. To plan ahead! – anything is possible if you have a plan, and a contingency plan.

We are grateful for the opportunity to work on this amazing project and to show it at the ETC Festival and our own showing days. We hope that the project will be able to travel to conferences in some form in the future as well – we want as many people as possible to experience it. We hope that this project added to a body of knowledge that everything doesn’t need to depend heavily on vision and that it is possible to have a full experience using only non-visual senses.