Interaction Design
Beespective
Objectives:
Classes:
INTREGR 641 Collaborative Capstone at UW Madison
DS 641 Advanced Design Thinking at UW Madison
Role: Researcher, Designer
Teammates:
Research: Shelcia David, Panna Dhariwal, Yasmin Nur, Claire Roos
Design: Yasmin Nur, Mary Thao, Han Zheng
Tools Used: Miro, Mural, Figma
Timeline:
Research: Feb — May 2024
Design: October — December 2023
Prototyping
Ideation and Research
Our initial concept was for an Augmented Reality (AR) experience to help inform people about bees. We thought that AR would be a great way for people to build empathy with bees, as someone could look through the eyes of a bee. We brainstormed and researched different application of AR.
We went to Milwaukee to explore different interactive experiences, such as Deep Lake Future and the Milwaukee Public Museum. We wanted to
gain insights into how different interactive experiences immerse their users and convey their message.
After visiting museums, we turned our focus away from AR and decided to try and incorporate more physical elements. We found that museums would often use multiple senses to get someone immersed in their story. We also worked on developing the story of our interactive experience, deciding to focus it on a possible future without bees.
We went to Milwaukee to explore museums and get feedback from artists and designers on our concept. We wanted to see how feasible our idea would be.
A sample layout for an interactive experience where the user explores a world in 2240 which has only one bee remaining.
Following feedback, we combined our idea for a choose your own adventure game with our idea for an interactive exhibit. We decided to make it a digital experience instead of physical since we were all familiar with digital prototyping and decided that a physical model would take too long to implement. I created wireframes to help illustrate the layout of our design.
I had the idea to add a tracker for money, environmentalism, and happiness as a way to make our experience more game like.
Research why Wisconsin bees are in danger.
Identify the most prescient issues impacting bees.
Conceptualize potential opportunity areas for solutions to the problems affecting bees.
Devise a fun way to educate the general public on the importance of bees.
Design an interactive experience to help the general public empathize with bees.
Research
Our group was tasked with figuring out how we can aid bees in Wisconsin. Bees are instrumental in many of the ecological and economic systems our society relies upon. The extinction of bees would be devastating for humanity, since bees are responsible for pollinating many of the crops and flowers we are reliant on.
However, figuring out how to save the bees is difficult, since a there are many issues they face. In this research, we discovered some of problems impacting bees.
I conducted interviews at the Wisconsin Honey Producer's conference. There, I got to interview a mixture of researchers, commercial bee keepers and beekeeping hobbyists.
Following our individual user research, our group came together to synthesize the data and discover key findings.
Empathy Mapping
We organized potential stakeholders into a empathy maps. Each person placed ideas for different aspects of the stakeholder: what they say, do, think, and feel. We used empathy mapping here to help organize our research in a manner that focused on the people impacting bees.
Affinity Diagramming
Each team member plotted different stakeholder problems that we saw in our research. We then categorized them and connected each of those categories based on how they impact each other. The categories we came up with were: Lack of Education, Ecological Issues, Economic Issues, Commercialization Problems, and Pathogens.
Narrowing Stakeholders
Based off of the feedback provided to us and our supplementary research, we refined our problem statements. We decided to add native bees and honey bees as stakeholders. We sought to consolidate the main issues that each stakeholder faced into a single problem statement. This would help us identify the key problems to try and resolve.
Opportunity Areas
We identified opportunity areas for potential future projects regarding bees. To do this, each person individually came up with an idea, and then we plotted those ideas on a scale of viability and originality.
Overview
Takeaways
There are ways to prototype a concept that are in a different medium than the concept you want to illustrate. We weren't able to make the physical experience we wanted, but were able to model it digitally.
Even if an idea doesn't make it to the final prototype, it can still be influential. We had different ideas for stories and environments that didn't make it into the final prototype, but they influenced some of the ideas for artifacts.
Sometimes, it is better to focus on the concept rather than the medium which you use to display it. A portion of our project was focused on AR, when our time would have been better spent developing our concept and story, and then figuring out how we wanted to display it.