Week 6
We’re sprinting to halves this week with three iterative builds. We’ve divvied up our interactions into the following sprints to test interactions and timing:
On Monday, we demoed the first build with the dog interaction (sheltering a dog and bringing it to a dog house) and the sheltering interaction (sheltering three animals in the rain). We found that moving the umbrella was very satisfying and the characters were really cute. Our feedback from faculty was to think about natural entries and exits for the characters, as well as the overall story and progression of events. We were also advised to think about how we can create immediate rewards for positive reinforcement, whether that is in the form of an animation, visual effects, or sound. We also realized that we would need to figure out the walking pace of children to time our interactions properly so that children have enough time to successfully complete the task. Hopefully, next week we can begin to race children at the Museum.
We also met with Ruth Comely, who warned us that animations could get quickly out of scope and to think about either purchasing assets or using an art style that would not require realistic animations. We are leaning towards a cartoon/2D puppet style for our models/animations to fit into the proposed art style of the exhibit, but also to decrease the scope of animation work. She also warned us that children may not understand these interactions. To address those concerns, we will be playtesting the demo next week at the Children’s Museum.
While working on these builds, we refined the interaction maps to be more detailed. Our focus on the interactions is to make sure that guests have multiple entry points and that no matter when/where the guest enters, they can have a rewarding experience. We also incorporated what we learned from observations/playtesting into these maps. For example, the average engagement time for a child in an exhibit is less than a minute (really 30 seconds), therefore children must be able to complete at least one interaction within a minute.
We also thought about how caregivers tend to guide play. We decided to change the flower interaction. Originally, it was intended as a way to show that kindness is not universal and doing something kind in one scenario may not be kind in another scenario, depending on the situation. We decided that every time the guest successfully completes an interaction, the animal will thank them by “dropping a seed” into a flower bed that will grow immediately into a flower. During the flower interaction cycle, guests will have to take care of the flower by giving it the appropriate amount of water and sunlight. When no one is interacting with the space, the flowers will die and allow for a natural restart of the flower bed. This interaction will hopefully be noticed by caregivers and they will encourage children to keep performing acts of kindness to fill the flower bed with flowers. The flowers will serve a subliminal counter for acts of kindness.
One thing that we are struggling with is timing out interactions. For the Fred Rogers Playtest Day at the Children’s Museum on March 20th, we will be playtesting in the space of the Text Rain exhibit, which is about half the width of the final installation space. As well, our demo space at the ETC is not as wide as the Text Rain exhibit. We will have to readjust timings as we change spaces.
To handle this, we will be playtesting at the Children’s Museum in the Text Rain exhibit space on February 27th before our bi-weekly client meeting. We will arrive on February 26th to set up our demo and fix timings.
On Wednesday, we had our weekly check-in with Rebecca Grabman. We updated her on our progress and next steps. She also let us know that the exhibits team had decided to theme the art style of the Kindness exhibit around the iconic architecture of Bloomfield, PA.
On Friday morning, Aly Delago from Apple stopped by to view our demo. She enjoyed the experience and thought that it was very cute and engaging.
In the afternoon, we took a field trip to Bloomfield to see the architecture and to get inspiration for the art style of our experience. Last week, we had decided that our environment should resemble a backyard to play off the theme of “Our Neighborhood,” that the client is moving forward with for the design of the exhibit space. Visiting Bloomfield was helpful to see what a backyard looks like in this area. In particular, we took a look at architecture styles, colors, fences, and also shrubbery.
On Monday, we hope to have our 3rd sprint build with all of our interactions in place and first drafts of all of our models to test.
Until then, be kind,
One Small Act