Mental Hesitations - my weak area

Over the last couple of days, I have been focussing more on idea generation and what interests me rather than research.

On Tuesday........
I decided to go with the idea of an immersive puzzle book, created as a touchscreen in Flash, that would be part of an immersive installation and also use sound and lighting. I decided my aims would be to to further my technical knowledge of flash, and examine the immersive, almost magical effects that interactive media can have on a user, in order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between humans and computers. This would also demand my consideration to practical aspects such as information architecture and design principles. The piece would aspire to blur the lines between a storybook and a game, and invoke a high level of mental interaction and immersion


On Wednesday afternoon.....

I wrote this into my 'Digital Doodles' interactive flashbased sketchbook:

"for the purposes of this project, I will create the touchscreen puzzle interface itself (my main
deliverable), and an animation of someone using it. I will plan out how the rest of the installation room would be set up and learn all the technical details, perhaps even creating a scale model out of foamboard for presentation purposes (I realize the brief says everything needs to be shown on screen, and all the important features will be- this is just for my own sake, and can be photographed as a slide show) I could also create a proposal with this pitching the complete idea to the museum. To give my deliverables an edge, I will also consider creating a mock-up environment of the installation at home, setting up a webcam and getting people to have a go at the puzzle. If I can use a touchscreen pane this would be great, but not essential. The point will be to film the facial reactions of the user to examine the immersive effect of my work, and consider ways of improvement based on this and questioning the test subject."

I then made some decisions about my audience:

the identification of an audience is dependant on the gallery that the installation is based in, because this says something about the type of person that will visit, and the age. I want my piece to appeal to a wide range of users, and for the sake of this project I am envisioning it to be for a small fictional gallery in brighton, and after some un-fruitful attempts at researching target audiences for galleries here, I have decided to use my own knowledge that brighton has a strong art and digital media reputation, so think that it would appeal to a lrge audience of students and exhibition lovers. I am going to pick my target audience based on casual puzzle game audiences, which according to research is 65% of women between 25-30, and 35% of men. However I am going to try and ake th egame gener nuetral, to try and interest as many men as possible as well as women (this could be done by the idea of a quest), and also take into account that brighton has a very youthful population, and the idea of a storybook immersion could easily appeal to yougner people too, so based on my research and own opinions, my target audience is men and women, aged 15-35.

I then brainstormed ideas for themes, and found it quite hard to come up with a story. I did some technical research and managed to get a drag drop feature working, so that a key can be dragged and dropped into a lock, and trigger the next frame....a script I could use to trigger animations in more ways than a key/lock, and make my touchscreen a bit more advanced then just using touch/activate buttons. However, this took me along time to learn. If I go with this idea, most of my time wll be spent coding, and I don't think this is very productive for my proffersional development, because I don't want to be a Flash coder. I'm more interested in visuals. I considered making my puzzles more basic, and putting my effort into creating a more diverse narrative, so there is more choice between different storylines, and the option of failing to pass the puzzles, and having something bad happen to the story character, and the story/game end, an okay idea, but it does not really grab me.

I then thought, what if I try and engage the viewer more by reverting back to another idea, and bringing teamplay into action. I could have two people in a room, and one (person action) is looking at on screen puzzles, and the other (person screenreader) is in front of the computer screen, on a large mat with squares on it. Each square has a pressure sensor in it, which correlates to a square on the screen. P.ScreenReader must instruct P Action on how to move back/forward/left/right based on the puzzle they see on the screen, in order to get the player to stand on the correct answer to the problem. The screen puzzle will be formed of rollover buttons that do nothing other than show a cartoon person standing there when that square activation key is pressed. They will work by hooking up each sensorpad to a keyboard key, so that the position of P.Action will appear on the screen. When P.Action reaches the correct answer position, the next level will activate. I could have 5 levels that work like this, and a 30 second timer for each puzzle. If the timer runs out, the game ends and the curator asks the players to leave through a losers door, and if they win they will be asked to leave through a winners door. There will be no difference, but I think the POSSIBILITY that there may be a reward will urge people to try and win. This would mean the players have to work together to suceed. P.Screenreader must be good as a speaker, and P.Action must be good as a listener and show trust in p.screenreader. I would make the environment quite cold and chilling, to encourage the players to focus attention on each other and the task at hand. I am hesitating to proceed with this idea becuase the deliverables for this project will end up being

1. an instruction manual on how to technically set the installation uo (which I am comfortable about the challenge of writing)
2. an animation of how it might look
3. the flash interface, but working with regular mouse or keyboard clicks for presentation purpopses
and maybe 4. a demo of a sensor activating a button to show I am capable of creating this

I think this is a perfectly resonable end result, so long as I think out all the puzzles well, and make the animation very well, but Im worried it's too conceptual.

So, I started to think, what am I really interested in about this idea? and I answered myself......examining the relationship between people and interaction. I like the thought of seeing how they react to my installation, more than creating an installtion itself, and am liking the thought of getting a fully working installation/interface working so that I can film and examine the users reactions.

SO... new idea.......what about a flash interface that makes no logical sense? I will play with design principles and makes navigations difficult, and touch on puzzles to mentally challenge the user to figure out how to get from start to end. They will simply use the keyboard and mouse, and I will then get a test subject, and record there reactions, to each myself about the way the user responds. I can then create a deliverable website or DVD that decsribes my experiment and shows the video of the interface being used, and my own commentry on what is causing challeneges and barriers to ease of use, in order to teach myself, an aspiring web designer, what is good and bad about interface design.

Each idea has pitfalls becuase what I want most s to builf a full installtion of my sensor rigger game idea and film this as an experiment looking at trust between people. But I do not have the resources to do this, and I don't just want to propose something. I want to do it.

So, desicions desicions..... I need to start making them! I am self aware of the fact that this is my weakpoint and need to address it, even if I make a mistake in my choice, at least I will have thrown all my energy into makig the best of it, rather than hesitating constantly about a way forward and ending up with a weak final outcome. SO, I aam taking a few days to consider my choice, and am going to vists an exhibtion on interactive media in Paris, and then in a week I will come back to this with a fresh perspective and commit myself to one of the three outlined choices above.

If you have any comments , please tell me.....( I could do with the input!)