Interview a Glass

What I did why I did this blah blah blah. I’m being lazy to edit this part lalalalalala

Interview with Generative Tools

I interviewed 3 participants. Participants will see this when getting into miro. The interview consists of three exercises (plus one warm-up exercise). Interviewees will access to miro board to complete the exercises. Then being interviewed about why they did the way they did.

Here to the sample miro board

The first board is called Image Deck/Image Sorting. It prompts the interviewee to recall their experiences through going through the images, and try to give an order of the experiences. The activity is aimed to figure out the borderline or margin point of someone's belief or judging system or experience.

The second board is aimed to help interviewees think about another layer of information (in this case their emotions) in the system they constructed previously. It's to observe how people make sense of new layer of information in their stated world view and/or how that refine their stated world view.

Same as the second board, the third board is to add in another layer of information (in this case objects) in their systems again. I want to see how they connect emotions with daily objects and what insights might this kind of odd connection bring up.

Product-Material Associations

Not sure what to do, I decided to just pop some experiments in and see where could it go. One of the questions I had was how people might read from objects. And maybe isolating one feature of the object could create more ambiguity on what people are perceiving, so they might bring up more unexpected connections. So I cut objects into similar-shaped pieces.

Text on Leaves

Still stuck. So I popped up an experiment again to see what it can bring me. I threw a bunch of leaves at the entrance of the room, with the intention of observing how people's behaviours were informed by the intervention. I also wrote texts on the leaves. As the leaves are stepped on, the texts break and form new meanings with the strokes.

We had fun. And the idea of paying attention to text got me thinking.

From my leaf experiment, I found

I was reading Olsen’s book Tracks and Signs Of the Animals and Birds of Britain and Europe for fun and realized people’s words are like traces of human thoughts, just like the trails and footprints animals left behind.

So my goal in phase two was to explore how might we collect the tracks and signs of people’s thoughts.

Still feeling stuck with a lot of thoughts in mind, I found that writing on paper doesn’t feel natural to my way of thinking. So I started to write on a box by my side and found that comfortable for me.

The box brought in the idea of orientation, in side and out side, close and open (dynamic & privacy), opposition and bouncing back in 3d... It brought in more dimentions in writing and organizing thoughts.

How the dynamic and flexibility of different surfaces affect reading sequence.

How ‘breaking into’ the material enables carries a different type of energy for noting.

Opportunities for using notes as wearables and other display opportunities.

The quality of privacy differences between insides and outside of the object.

A plastic bottle is transparent with complex surface transitions, like natural grids for me to write. I can't write on the inner side, but it still creates interesting overlaying effects. Because there are so many orientation opportunities on a shape like a bottle, I could easily highlight things by changing the orientation (and with colour differences).

Writing on this semi transparent surface it's fun. I can read the text from the other side. It's has a natural highlight depends on which side you place it. And I tried different orientations to write, which creates different difficulties of reading. And depends on which angle you place it, it forms different hierarchy of the information.

An egg carriage has interesting typography. I can write in different orientations, across surfaces with the string of thoughts, and it makes the writing more interesting. It has natural highlighting point which could also be used as a way to group thoughts. It also opens up a unique way to display notes.

The coffee tray also has very interesting typography, which makes the writing adventurous since it's difficult to predict the surface quality for the next line.

The sushi box has a bigger proportion of flat surface with natural grid on it for me to write something that's visually formatted. I used it as a reminder. It's also good for writing additional information. The surface turnings create natural visual hierarchies. And I don't feel anxious about approaching the margin when writing because each side can be continuous into another side.

The sushi bowl feels like a combination of the cup lid and the sushi box. Readers' attentions are drawn toward the center, while the circular rings around provide varies orientations of formating the information.

Writing with hands didn't make me feel better understanding the knowledge. So I tried with typing, printing and then mapping on a big surface. Sketched diagrams serves as anchors for me to quick access my memory about that information at that location.

I then tried to treat the reading highlights as product design ideations and applied convergent thinking skills to manipulate the sketches. I'm trying to see if my previously learned product design process can be applied in research practice.

The earlier experiments mainly focused on how to plot each one of our thoughts onto different forms of surfaces. But how can different forms of thoughts speak to each other?

 In my mind opinions come like arrows. They shoot toward the core of the topic from different directions and backgrounds.

I tried to plot out the different considerations of my current research question. These models provide opportunities to reconcile different viewpoints.

Weaving post-its together allows me to document with more free forms. It's easy to connect various topics, adding or joining topics together. The set-up is easy to uninstall, transport, and set up at a different location. However, it can be time-consuming to create.

Zijing was prompted to make something physically about what's in his mind of the week. He was thinking about his interview project. So he made a camera that represents filming the interviewee with details of the interview goal written on the clapperboard on the camera. We then discussioned about his thinking process.

Zijing thinks with scenaries. When prompted to visualize what's in his mind physically, he thought about the scenary of himself shooting videos to his interviewees. He then tried to create something he could interact with to replicate the scenary in his mind. It's very different than my mind which is mostly through keywords and morphing diagrams.