Project Three: Activate

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Project Three
Activate!
Experiments in Experience Design


OVERVIEW

Your goal is to design and implement a compelling interactive experience that enriches the school during an event known as Activate: Experiments in Experience Design, which will take place on Friday, April 3. This collaborative class project will synthesize the design skills you have developed in this course, and includes individual, team, class and multi-class components.



BREAKDOWN

In the first stage, you will become familiar with a variety of relevant precedents, covering a spectrum of scale, skill, discipline, material and intent. A specific theme - Urban Interventions - will be emphasized.

In the second stage, you will each develop one experience for presentation to the class. This presentation will take the form of a user scenario storyboard: a graphical narrative of the experience through the senses of one or more specific persona(s).

In the third stage, you will collaborate in small groups to develop a further series of experiences for presentation to the class. The presentation will take the form of a role play: physically acting out what happens when users engage with your experience.

In the fourth stage, the class will decide on a single experience that will become our contribution to Activate. This experience will incorporate the positive qualities from the individual and group proposals.

In the fifth stage, the class will separate into task-specific teams and develop the experience in greater detail. The following issues will be addressed:

• Limited Budget: The cost of the experience will be shared equally by the class, and will not exceed $25 per person.
• Material Flows: The experience is not permitted to generate any waste. All materials used must be recycled in some way.
• Intuitive Functionality: The experience must be easily understood and engaged, without instruction.
• Temporal Sequencing: The experience design must account for the individual users’ time of interaction, and the collective time of interaction of entire event.
• Site Specificity: The experience will take place in one or more of the following locations: rhe Auditorium (room 190), the Lambert Lounge (room 187), the Mader/Caldwell Passageway (room 175B), the Main Lobby (room 175A) and Butterfield Park.

Our specific location will be determined in negotiation with the other sections of the course.

Other potential issues include advertising and promotion, aesthetics, durability, and portability. Given the undetermined nature of this project, further unknown challenges will emerge. It is critical that individuals and teams communicate and co-ordinate their activities with the entire class. The course blog will facilitate this.

The means to develop the experience will be determined by the class, and will include some combination of brainstorming, storyboarding, role-playing, task analyses, user testing, drawings, models and prototypes.

In the sixth stage, the class will make the experience a reality. Teams may change in this stage. This stage will culminate with the event itself - Activate - on April 3 (specific times TBA).

In the seventh stage, we will stage a group debrief session, where we will perform individual, team and class self-evaluation, and provide feedback to the other classes. We will also recycle our project, physically and conceptually.

Milestones:
Wednesday, March 11: Precedent Presentations:
Previous Iterations
Urban Interventions

March 12 - March 17: Individual Experience Ideation

Wednesday, March 18: Individual Presentations
Group Experience Ideation and Presentations
Collective Decisions and Team Selections

March 19 – March 24: Experience Refinement
(team meetings as required)

Wednesday, March 25: Team Presentations
Final Experience Specifications

March 26 – March 31: Experience Creation
(team meetings as required)

Wednesday, April 1:
Final Class Meeting

April 2:
Experience Creation
(team meetings as required)

Friday, April 3: Activate: Experiments in Experience Design

Wednesday, April 8: Aftermath: Debrief, Feedback, Recycle



DELIVERABLES AND EVALUATION

This Project is worth 25% of your total grade in this course. A combination of faculty and peer evaluation will determine your mark. Specific deadlines will be established as the project progresses. Active participation in all phases is critical to the success of the Project and to your evaluation: your Participation mark, worth 10% of your total grade in this course, will also be largely determined by your engagement with this project.