Reflection on Clinics and workshops

Chenchen Shen 4241010

Workshop Mini EI----Sep.10 In this workshop, we learnt to observe interactions and discuss their qualities, to present a view on an interaction and desired interaction qualities. At first, I felt it a little bit weird to act out an interaction and exaggerate the actions, which sounds like a game in the kindergarten. But soon I found the purpose of this step is to make us understanding the meaning of interaction qualities and be sensitive to them. The presentations for current and desired interactions were quite interesting, and some groups were really creative. This step lay a good foundation for us to understand what interaction vision is in the future. Workshop IV----Oct.01 I really love the workshop on that day. The goal was to design a new canteen experience with the qualities of openness and refreshingness. Our group made a small movie to present our interaction vision, and also found a metaphor for it. Next we chose the movie as the base for further design exploration. We reminded ourselves of the experiences related to the feeling of the interaction vision and the movie, analyses the reasons and cause behind it, and then came up with lots of interesting ideas which I personally liked very much. That time I thought that there were a lot of good ideas during such kind of workshops, but we always regarded them as a practice and did nothing with these ideas, that s a pity. We should further develop some meaningful ideas. Workshop IP----Oct.11 During the workshop, I tested two intervention prototypes: interactions between the mailman and the mailbox, and interactions between the mailman and the receiver. First idea was to make the mail slot on the door give some sound feedback to mailman, like message music, jokes, etc. I organized a role playing for this, which turned out interesting. But it may be an extra effort for the receivers to make the sound. The second idea was to let mailman do an easy thing for the receiver, like sing a song, dance, hug or say something. I got the feedback that the design should not become too much of an effort for the mailman; it has to make his job more fun, not more time consuming. Also I should watch out for the feasibility of the concept to make it applicable to the actual situation. Contextmapping Clinic----Oct.04 Actually, I did not gain much from this clinic, because each person in this group have quite limited time, and we spent most time on introducing our design goal and what we had done. But it was nice to have the chance to learn about the projects in other studios and give advice to each other.