Week 7

With halves just around the corner, we spent the week putting together our slide deck. But that doesn’t mean that work stopped for this team…

After building out our third iteration, we decided to change the flower interaction to only serve as a subliminal counter for acts of kindness. We had originally planned on including a cycle to help take care of the flowers, however, it did not translate well into the build. The interaction was difficult to understand and frustrating. For now, the flowers will appear every time an act of kindness is performed and will disappear if the experience has not been acted on for a full cycle.

On Wednesday, we returned to the Children’s Museum to playtest our experience and to demo to our client.

This was the first time that we integrated our setup (see first photo above) into the Text Rain space, which is where we will be demoing our experience for the Children Museum’s Playtest Day on Fred Roger’s Birthday (March 20th). This was helpful for figuring out any tech problems beforehand. Things that we will have to consider for the public playtest day are:

• how we’re going to tether the umbrella to better replicate the final installation
• lighting in the space
• how to bribe children to play our experience

After playtesting with five groups of children we found that:

• the sheltering interaction was confusing, since the dog interaction involved bringing the dog to a location, it made guests believe that they had to bring the other characters somewhere as well
• we will have to refine emotional effects to occur right as they have sheltered the character
• the rain cycles are currently too short and jarring, we will need to extend the rain time (which is more reflective of Pittsburgh weather anyways)

Our clients were overall very pleased with the demo and happy with the progress that we’ve made so far. They’re excited to see more interactions as they are developed, and to work with us through the integration of the physical umbrella prop.

From the data that we collected at the museum, we decided to refine our interactions to be all goal-oriented and to occur in sequence within the rain cycle. We will continue to refine art assets and the environment for our next playtest before spring break.

On Friday, John Sharp from Parsons, visited and gave us feedback on our experience. As a longtime vegan and animal rights activists, he warned us to be careful with teaching children to be friendly with wild animals. In addition, he talked about how kindness is about meeting people at where they are at, and asked how our experience would be different if the guest had to instead keep up with the characters instead of the characters keeping up with the guest. He liked the design and art style of the experience, mentioning how children are sensitive to design; they tend to sense what is age appropriate for them or not.

This weekend, we will be practicing for halves presentations on Monday (we’re going first!) and finishing our fourth iteration. Wish us luck on Monday!

Be kind,
One Small Act