The End :'(

Week 15 + Onward

And just like that we’ve reached the end!

Before Fall Festival, we worked on onboarding for our experience. We:

Changed the hints to be larger and shortened to 3 calls to action
Added hidden interaction of when the guest turns the whole wall a color, it will display a cool effect
Changed the seed effect: when the installation has not been interacted with for 45s, it will display the seed, and then clear the wall back to either black; if there is a block in the wall, the cubby will display that color –> this will hopefully make the experience easier to understand, since it’s easier to start from a blank wall, and much more rewarding
We will playtest with 3 blocks: R, G, B
Painted RGB Color wheel and block symbol decals on bottom of installation

Last week, we had mentioned that we wanted to playtest a 4th clear block. After playtesting with a few ETC students, we found that it was confusing, especially since we had added the blackout state. When a clear block was put into a blank cubby, it wouldn’t react and that would make the experience seem like it was broken.

Fall Festival was a wonderful success!! We had a constant flow of people in the room and waiting to try our installation. Not only were guests excited to see the installation, but the team received lots of positive feedback about the construction of the installation and other potential applications for the installation. People could not believe that we had made it all ourselves! Especially the fabrication of the installation (you go Marissa!)!

It was gratifying for the team to share our work with alumni, family, and friends. Wei in particular did a great job sharing out work and showcasing the tech for the exhibit (Yes Wei for learning how to network!).

In general, guests understood the interactions more clearly:

Guests discovered color of block faster
Reset phase was rewarding & encouraged experimentation
Hidden interaction were delightfully surprising

Our late night vibes during Fall Festival complete with lavender scents.

But the work didn’t stop after halves… we spent the weekend preparing for finals!

Co-writing our finals deck…almost there!

And choreographing our live demo.

Getting ready for our live demo during finals.

(Photos coming soon of finals!)

Overall, we were really happy with how our final presentation turned out (link will be coming soon)! Faculty were impressed with our live demo and ooed and ahhed during our unveiling. We were really happy to be sharing our work and how much we learned this semester.

Next steps, we are handing off the MuseumLab. Right after finals, we worked on finalizing our technical support documentation, that included:

Troubleshooting
Fabrication instructions
Technical instructions
Interaction explanation
Facilitation tips
Scaffolding moments

We had Steve Audia and John Balash review our content, and they were happy to have us run it down with them before we left.

Delivering our installation to the MuseumLab.

We met with staff at the MuseumLab and provided them with the documentation as a hard copy, on a thumbdrive with files, and through Google drive. As well, we provided back-up materials like blocks, hint cards, stands, symbol stickers, NFC stickers, etc. We also provided a setting station for the staff to program new NFC stickers if necessary.

Handoff meeting and technical review with staff.

We walked the staff through the new interactions and how to facilitate play among guests.

And then it was time to say goodbye…and it was much harder than we all thought it was going to be. We worked so hard on her all semester, and we couldn’t believe it was over.

But we did leave the semester with a new sense of family and excitement about the field of experience design! It’s not goodbye, but see you later. I personally can’t wait to see what wonderful and amazing things everyone on this team goes to work on in the future.