IDeATe

Intention

Our intent for this project was to create an experience that was a commentary on the invasiveness and persistence of technology today. Technology is constantly around us and is often collecting data without us even knowing. We wanted to bring this awareness to the guests and nudge them to think about what “data” they are giving to technology. Moreover, we wanted to create an experience that didn’t end when the user left the physical space, similar to how our data doesn’t stop being collected when we close out of an app or submit a form. We also wanted to incorporate the idea of the unintelligence of AI with regaurds to contextual information. Many of us have this idea that AI is magical and can one day replace humans, but we often forget that AI is only capable of what we give it.

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Context

Give examples of prior work, ideas and projects that influenced your design. What work informed this idea i.e. make links to the material in class and the cases/projects you uncovered in this module. Describe theory, concepts, and research from this module that relate to your outcome.

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Prototype/Outcome

Our “room” is the entryway/ coat rack but to the guests we do not want to seem like an exhibit ourselves. We will simply act as the “welcome” area to the Haunted [Smart] Home Exhibit that introduces guests as they walk in and take their backpacks. They will see a computer screen with an introduction and a button that takes them to a form where they can “leave a note on the wall”. They will enter in some information about themselves and answer some questions that prompt them to reveal insights about their fears of technology and interests in specific exhibits. Once they fill out the form and drop their bag, we will direct them to the exhibits where they will use their phones to tap into the “RFID” tags at each exhibit, which will allow us to unknowingly track their location and time spent at each exhibit. We will then use this information and AI to generate a “report” and a thermal printer to provide a physical artifact of their time at the exhibit. We will fold it in a letter type format and drop it in their bags. When they open their backpack later that day, they find this piece of information about themselves and are stopped to think about how it got in there, how it knows all of that information about them. At the end of the report, there will be a QR code that links to our website that explains our exhibit.

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Process

We went through a long brainstorming process before we were able to narrow down our idea, form, and experience. Emily started out with this initial idea of a magical coat rack that when you placed your coat on it, by the time you picked it up to leave there was a note of something lost or remembered in your pocket. This catapulted us into the idea of creating an experience that didn’t end when the user left the physical space. However, we quickly realized that many people might not have coats in the beginning of may so we refined it to a “bag drop” because we figured many of the users would be students coming from class. We knew that our output would be a “letter” that was generated via thermal printer because Emily had experience working with that piece of technology from the previous unit. We bounced ideas back and forth about the input form, from written to text, and voice to text, and finally ended with a digital form to easily capture the information. Then we were tasked with how to capture the users actions during their time at the exhibit and convert that information into a form that we could track and place into ChatGPT. We had a wide range of ideas from having a person following the user, to qr code cans, RFID, all the way to computer vision tracking. We ended up using RFID tags but having the “tagger” be the user’s phone to decrease the extra hardware needed.

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Open Questions and Next Steps

What remains unresolved (in the concept, implementation or conversation around this outcome)? What are the things we should pay attention to for future explorations? What questions about 'spookiness' or everyday technology did this exploration raise or generate? What questions reamin to be addressed?

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Reflection

With regards to the critique that we received from CMU professionals on 4/20/23, we feel like our idea was well received. However, we won’t know for sure until the day of the exhibit because we had to tell the professors our idea of acting like a welcome area, instead of a room itself. An aspect that we were wary about was the experience of dropping the note in their backpack, but it was received with overwhelming positive reactions and was a nice surprise. One professor had concerns about users who did not have a backpack or bag which brought up an exception and prompted us to think deeper into the overall experience for all users. With regaurds to what we need to do to create a good experience: we need to refine the RFID tagging experience with user’s phones to make sure the experience is seamless and unknowingly tracking user’s data. How do we prompt the user to tap their phones on the tags at each exhibit in a way that isn’t obvious but nudges them to tap with high accuracy. We also want to refine the physical container for the letter to elevate the overall experience and memorabilia that the user gets to keep with them after the exhibit ends. Emily is thinking about the packaging design for the letter, possibly adding gold embellishments or a spooky saying.

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Attribution and References

Reference any sources or materials used in the documentation or composition.