#ozchi24
An issue we’ve had in this challenge was to truly nail down what serendipity meant to us, without a hard definition it’s hard to figure out what can summon it.
In the end we ended up deciding on a definition that worked for us based on the encounters we had as we roamed about Hobart and surrounds. Serendipity to us is the idea of positive random events occurring, it’s something undefinable and utterly unique to each person.
One of the different ideas we had early on was to use augmented reality in some way to encourage serendipitous events. We spent a long time trying to figure out what about augmented reality would actually be something that people would want to see. We thought the idea of being able to see what is occurring around you would lead to people choosing to do something completely ad-hoc and lead into serendipitous experiences.
This idea turned into a magic wand which could be waved around to see what was occurring on around you, or binoculars you could use to see through the normal into the events and places you normally couldn’t see from your current point.
We then started to imagine what it would be like to see the information transferred through the air, being able to see the TV channels and radio stations as you walked about.
In the end we moved away from these ideas because of the very meaning of serendipity. These ideas, whilst good, were ultimately too active on the users to allow for true serendipity to occur in our opinion, so we went back to the drawing board to start again.
So, that’s two rounds of iterative testing complete. Time for the hard slog to the finish.
#ozchi24
And so it has begun, another 24 hours of randomness, design, intelligence and stupidly. Somehow, on this day our eccentricities combine, erupting into a torrent of twitter one-liners, jokes and visions of foolishness. Yet we still somehow maintain a shred of professionalism behind the scenes, and manage to create something that actually has purpose.
Arriving late—again—we were at our designated meeting place by 11:00, and began debating serendipity. How should we approach this, which definition and focus should we adopt? Will this box us in too early? And so it goes. No matter where you are, 24 hours never feels enough. For us we always feel limited; we usually only figure out what we want once it’s 16:30 on a Saturday and most people have disappeared…go us! Frustration, desperation, and then exaltation. From sitting in the wonderful couches in the tea room, to wandering the Salamanca Markets and Hobart CBD, to libraries and mountains, the brainstorming yielded magnificent fruit…mmm…delicious fruit.
We began turning these ideas into prototypes, assessing their feasibility and potential. Taking our cue from the Challenge Brief, we allowed fate to play its part—serendipity as it were— it was our chance encounters that prompted us to decide which of our prototypes (and thus ideas) to pursue. With our first [CONFIDENTIAL - ack ack] deployed, our initial results came in. Filled with excitement and that wonderful feeling of frostbitten appendages, we sat down to review our results, and to relate them back to the research.
Now…it’s dinner time.
Till the next update, om nom nom
#ozchi24 #encounter We had been walking around Salamanca Markets and Hobart City to try and garner some inspiration for the challenge when we saw this box on the ground, we instantly stopped and dug through it. Although in the end there was nothing in the box we wanted we felt that this encounter is the very essence of a serendipitous encounter, a single element had stopped our lives for a moment and made them better because of it.
Team UTAS, once again blogging for the good of humanity and whatnot. Oh, and for the OzCHI24 Design Challenge.
