Oct 07-14 (1st week)
Teammates - Anya, Ava Shepard, Effy, Sofia, Zhe.
<aside> 🔍 Brief: Design a tool or instrument that enables you to access the invisible, the unmeasurable, the intangible on London's streets.
</aside>
It was the time when I had just got out of COVID-19 home quarantining after arriving at London. I hadn’t moved around much, and it was perfect that the project started with a walking experience. We were divided in groups and were asked to observe the hidden or intangible aspects of Spitalfields. We had the time to get to know our groupmates as we were having conversations with each other observing different things.
As we discussed many aspects of our observations, I realised that my observations mostly had architecture background. Like the scale, colour, and the proportions of the street. I had the most amazing Duck and chips while we spoke to Alaistair about the various ideas that we had. I was very reluctant to put forth my idea, but when I did, I realized that it wasn’t daunting anymore.
Photo documentation of my initial idea of exploring the various textures of London surface
Even though this was a one week project and with a completely new people to work with, there were no delays in generating ideas. We discussed about the ways in which we felt time changed as we moved across various sections of the street. As a set majority of international students, Effy pointed that the one factor that everyone one of us could relate was about personal space and how that has changed as we walked past strangers on the street.
Having said that, once we moved out of the initial brainstorming phase, I felt that the process slowed down. We were working both online and offline, so Miro seemed to be a good place to collaborate.
Our first idea was to simulate the experience of walking in the streets of London by using strips of foam to represent individuals walking around. Zhe suggested a different approach to execute the project. Both ideas seemed fair, but I wasn’t convinced the idea the idea of executions in both the cases where we would ask the volunteer to walk through strips covered with paint wearing a bodysuit.
I suggested an alternative where the volunteer would sit in one place and there would be actual people walking around them and their emotions could be captured using a device that could detect the change in emotions and represent it on a screen using colours. There was a debate in between on whether the person should be blindfolded or not.
It was during the discussion with John and Elle that I gained some good insight that there is no such thing as a device to detect emotions. A major learning point that I got from this was that, in order to know what emotion a person is going through, the best way to know is to simply ask and observe.
The simple solution was to prototype a bodystorming experience for the subjects to go through. Therefore, the solution flowed into a direction where the user themselves are the instruments who detect the emotion, and their bodies and faces could be the reading which could be visually analysed to understand the emotion.
Bodystorming is a way of subjecting a person's own body to physically experience a situation in order to ideate
After much discussion, we decided on three scenarios for the subject to go through to show the contrast in physical spaces.