Public Space Design
About
As a group project for Experience Design I544 class taught by professor Erik Stolterman, a new design challenge was before us. Explore a unique problem in a public space, that a design solution can provide a new experience to multiple people.
Process
After forming a team of five in a blind dating fashion we immediately took it to the whiteboard and brainstorm. We mind mapped our thoughts about picking a public space starting from the public space, who engages in these spaces and what are the functions of these public spaces. From the brainstorming we found a genre of problems leading into the public space of shopping mall and one kind of usecase especially realteable by all the team members and it was "people waiting for their partners at while they shop".
Survey
To put this hypothesis to test we conducted a survey at the mall by asking people to fill up a short survey sheet. We took great care to keep the survey short at the same time engineered the questions so as to bring out the issue and thoughts of people regarding the problem we assumed. The survey responses pointed to the problem we hypothesized and validated them while also representing a broad demographic of people. Survey takers included people of all age groups teenagers, young adults and senior citizens.
Survey results pointed us towards the direction we were hoping to head. The major cause of feeling emotionally disconnected in a shopping couple is "boredom". The one engaging in shopping activity gets flooded with Dopamine which keeps them in a positive loop of continuing the activity, however, the partner waiting has no such drive, they are getting bored and eventually feel disconnected with empathizing with their shopping partner. We learnt that a third of the people would active seek to socialize in a space like shopping mall and another third willing. Another indication of boredom was seen in the perception of partners waiting, they reported to percieve the time they wait to be much more than they actually do.
Ethnographic Study
The next step was to engage and obseve with people facing this problem ethnographically. We went shopping with three couples over a period of two weekends and spent time with them when they were together in their drive to the shopping place and then separating to go into the shop or engage in the shopping activity. We observed a lot of tacit behaviour among shoppers and waiting partners. We observed emotional conditions, time a person spends waiting against the time they think they spend, their time spending activities, the distance they travel seeing some form of entertainment, the artifacts they engage with and the time they spent on phone.
Interview & Research
We interviewed ten people which included singles and couple of various ages. We interviewed them separately and then together. While interviewing the people one-to-one we urged them to be candid about their personal shopping experience, their percieved reasons for disinterest of their partner's shopping exprience or their concerns about their own shopping experience. Interviewing people together we asked them to be frank and somewhat engage in a discussion about their collective shopping experience. They were also asked to recall any issues that lead them to unrest in their relationship. We did a literature research about how shopping malls are designed with accord to people, if at all and wether the issue of engaging waiting partners had been addressed before. We found limited literature on those.
The Design
We unanimously chose to focus on a narrow demographic so as to meet the issue head-on and solve it at least for that constricted demography of people. We decided to focus on young adults who age between 20 years to 40 years. We did so because often we found this particular age group facing this issue and the propensity of the male partners to stay disconnected from the shopping experience and showed interest in engaging socially within the environment.
Hence Mall Battle, a competitive gaming environment where anyone can walk into the game zone and engage in a vitual three dimentional game without any prior knowledge of the game. It is random enough so not only skilled players win and variable enough to keep it exciting for many plays. Although the game takes palce in the mall hallway the players are connected with their partners by bring their shopping choices into the game and displays the gamers action in response it connects them both. It is un-intrusive giving choices for all kinds of shoppers and partners to either engage in the game, not engage in it or continue staying with the partner. Hence letting people do what they love while letting their counterparts do what they love, shop.
