Codesign

I was fortunate to join the Blended Interaction Studio, a multidisciplinary team under the direction of Dr. Brian O’Keefe. The team was continuing their research on mobile augmented reality technologies in the form of an iOS application. I had joined as an Interaction Designer to create a workshop series connecting a historic village museum, middle school students of different schools, app developers, researchers, and multimedia students. 

Can you turn schoolchildren into interaction designers?

I leveraged co-design workshops for instruction and generative design with the school students and historic village museum. I coordinated the schedules and outcomes from workshops to support the development of our app content prior to field testing. The field research included using our co-created prototype AR application with surveys conducted by students to historic village guests.

Results

We all had a blast! Even with the slight technical difficulties the app had during our field study, the students were really enthusiastic about their experience with the project. Our work was published in the 28th British HCI Conference conference proceedings for other researchers to use [Dr. Brian O’Keefe’s perfect explanation of it all.].

A major challenge we had faced was with some of the technology. One of the early versions of the technology had difficulties in going from map navigation to video streaming during the tour. It became really difficult to show other people how the app works when its main feature was having difficulty with connecting to cellular service. The historical village has very minimal modern technology and any that does exist is hidden from guest view.

Our options were extremely limited. We had to make adjustments on location for the next group of observers, I had an idea: “why not load all of the video content on another iOS device and show that as the app updates the map navigation?” I had quickly loaded all the video content onto my iPad and used the combination of both devices to get through the day of testing. The developers were able to turn those bugs around for later uses of the app.

Impact

I learned that you have to be very careful when shifting how a goal will be met during the course of a project. Because it is important to find a balance between what each team is looking to accomplish, compromises and adjustments are critical. At the end of the day it is entirely worth it the you are able to help contribute to making a positive experience for all parties involved. My experience taught me that as much investment you put into your individual contribution, it is never more important than the goals of the group.