WEEK 2 : Brainstorming

Chasing ideas and getting to work

Hi, I’m Tauseef the worst engineer on the team, but second coolest. In my past lives I’ve been a photographer and I can draw. So I will be assisting with the programming and filming side of the project.

This week I’m taking over the project blog to talk about recent developments.

The learnings

The most interesting insights that we have gained are around a presentation that Dr Kody J. Manke, from the department of Psychology at CMU, did for our class. The presentation majorly covered Stereotype Threat, which means that members of a community are or are at a risk of conforming to the stereotypes of their social group.

Another huge take away was how much being in a racism salient situation changes how people would behave, as opposed to normal situations.

Why groups differ in performance is not the same as why individuals differ in performance.

The Brainstorming

We have narrowed down the emotions that we’d like to achieve with the experience that we build to two. Empathy and Discovery.

Empathy because if the people who interact with the experience connect with the characters on an emotional level, we can have a greater impact. And discovery because we would like people to explore and understand different perspectives.

We sat together, the six of us, to bounce ideas off of each other. And have come up with a list of possible features and content ideas that we’d like to start prototyping. These features in one way or the other aid the emotions that we aim to elicit.

Features

• POV (in the shoes of the character)
• Interactive Campus Map (inspiration: bear71.nfb.ca)
• 360° video? (because they’re very powerful)
• Social Media (to personalize the experience)
• Survey at the end
• Story branches (choose your own adventure)

Content Ideas

• Physically identical characters
• Animation
• Positive interactions between different races
• Abstracting out race completely

Going forward into the next week we will work on narrowing down the medium and also work on the branding for the project. We will start prototyping some of the ideas so that we can find out the most powerful ones that fit the project best.