self - reflection

Overview

I am happy with the process and the challenges we were able to encounter in our journey. Despite being situated remotely in different countries our team sincerely met twice every week. Which led to a closer professional bonding between the team and understanding at several stages of the project. When one suffered a creative block the other took the lead. I am usually the quiet one in design teams, but this time the steering wheel was naturally passed from one director to the other.

My Role

I concentrated on researching speculative design, and imposter syndrome associated with the social media platforms. I was able to lead the team in making design decisions by using tools like service blueprint and framing the design challenge by IDEO. I was also actively working on researching several platforms and creating a design for the ideal platform that we would need for the gathering and display of data. I also created the group blog on cargo and am constantly updating the group log.

I have been working recording the voices and making a website where all the elements of the story will be incorporated. In these terms I was interested in exploring the social media platforms as a medium of storytelling one of the great examples would be the samsung s10 campaign where they use instagram story to create a narrative to explore the feature of the gadget. I came across Web 3.0 and the speculation of the way the internet is evolving in the book The Spatial Web: How Web 3.0 Will Connect Humans, Machines, and AI to Transform the World.

I also was able to introduce the sustain lab card game to the team when we wanted to add a bit of gamification to our tea time session. I created the code for the physical game inspired by one of the sessions with Indira Knight on coding for the web. The game was very helpful to get new ideas on the plate. Lastly, I created the wix website as an archive of all the stories submitted so far.

My Learnings

I have always been a fan of using design tools, When I was a novice I would follow the tools from scratch, but now through practice I am now able to strategize and create tools at several points the project would benefit from the linearity and when to keep it loose. Being able to embrace creativity yet efficiency in the process.

For the explorations of the platform, I was able to understand the basics of web domains, hosting servers and databases. Which I thought were more or less the same thing earlier. The Idea originates from the institutions being able to function well during the time of pandemic. It helped us to critically think of a more flexible structure which can accommodate change. We believe that every individual should have a voice in creating the structure of the system, and that is where storytelling can help us, these collaborative stories can help people speculate future scenarios and think of ways to deal with them even before they happen.

Future Scope

We faced a lot of challenges in defining the platform that will be easy for people to share their speculations. We even tried creating a platform of our own which we realized the layer in the process would take months to be up and running. Hence the reason why we had to use multiple platforms to collect stories through which we were able to recreate a similar effect. I would like to work on designing a platform for collaborative storytelling as a form of feedback mechanism. Not to undervalue the quality of information we got through the zoom tea time session where conversations were happening realtime.

This tool can be used by several organisations to be able to create a fiction storytelling platform for constructive feedback. In the future I want to speculate on how these patterns will change due to the emerging technologies like, 360degre videos, and interactive web based narratives and ambisonic sounds. How will the users interact with this medium on the web and how will this kind of information be managed.

References:

• Galafassi, D., T. M. Daw, M. Thyresson, S. Rosendo, T. Chaigneau, S. Bandeira, L. Munyi, I. Gabrielsson, and K. Brown. 2018. ‘Stories in Social-Ecological Knowledge Co - Creation’, Resilience Alliance

• Fiona Raby, Anthony Dunne. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

• ‘Frame Your Design Challenge’. [n.d.]. <https://www.designkit.org/methods/frame-your-design-challenge> [accessed 21 July 2020]

• Jaron, Lanier. 2010. You Are Not a Gadget

• Kalevi Koskinen, Ilpo, Stephan Wensveen, Johan Redström, Thomas Binder, and John A. Zimmerman. 2011. Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom

• Lab, Situation. [n.d.]. ‘The Thing From The Future’, Situation Lab <http://situationlab.org/project/the-thing-from-the-future/> [accessed 21 July 2020]

• Costikyan, Greg. [n.d.]. ‘I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games’: 25

• Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman. [n.d.]. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (The MIT Press) Hardcover (MIT Press)

• Robert Klanten. 2010. Data Flow: V. 2: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design

• Ilpo Koskinen, John Zimmerman, Thomas Binder, Johan Redstrom, Stephan Wensveen. 2011. Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom

• Gabriel René, Dan Mapes,. 2019. The Spatial Web: How Web 3.0 Will Connect Humans, Machines, and AI to Transform the World

• Lab, Situation. ‘The Thing From The Future’, Situation Lab <http://situationlab.org/project/the-thing-from-the-future/>

• ‘Samsung UK S10 Campaign(@samsunguk) • Instagram Photos and Videos’. <https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17909313637387474/>