regybct-blog

[regybct-blog]

My BCT poster

For me the “Golden rule” of BCT was to just do things and see if it worked out. And to be honest, I didn’t really have a clear view on how to show this through my poster, however after doing a multitude of versions on Photoshop I finally came to this version of it. The idea behind this poster was that the image of Shia Labeouf on the right (which is from a meme from which he yells to “JUST DO IT!”). And the legendary Jedi master Yoda (on the right), who gives the pretty inspiring quote of “do or do not ... there is no try”, came from an other-worldly, somewhat divine place to come and share their teachings to the rest of the world.

As I am posting this I have also seen the designs of the other students and all I can say is that I am not really as inept as the other students when creating “normal art things” as can be seen in my 1st blog post. However I feel like the hand-painted-esque way the background and the text on top were presented suits the very hands-on approach that we have in this course as we are almost always building things with our hands. To add to this the meme-ness of this poster was my attempt to get a laugh out of people, in a weird (I guess) way to show the fun that was had during classes. 1st blog post: https://regybct.tumblr.com/post/183044218245/thing-that-represents-me

Yoda image from: http://www.stickpng.com/img/at-the-movies/star-wars/yoda-star-wars

Shia labeouf image from: http://www.stickpng.com/img/memes/just-do-it/just-do-it-shia-labeouf

[regybct-blog]

Reflective Journaling

A little backstory: So, I’ve been putting this whole thing off ever since I found out about it on the 25th of April. Partly due to not really being sure as to what I would reflect on and write about. Mostly however, due to thinking myself to be out of my depth in terms of writing this thing. So now, here I am writing this (sort of Mid panic) trying to get something presentable out. Hope it was worth while reading/marking this. :)

So now on to the real thing: Cards for play A project that had meaning to me in Creative Technologies (meaningful basically meaning our only project at the time of writing this as our current one (data objects) is still being written up/worked on) Was my initial project of Cards for Play. the subject of this project was to create a “card experience” that promoted play for a target audience that our group collectively chose. Thing’s in this group were going smoothly; we had initially established our core purpose and set the “play aesthetics” that we wanted to apply in terms of our project, this set the foundation of our project and, in turn, “plated the seeds” (so to speak) of which our ideas would “blossom”. Our group went through many forms of “ déjà vu” in which we would go through multiple concepts that were eventually, pun intended, discarded. However, It was through this that we as a group attained a greater understanding of this project and what path we needed to take to see what aspects stuck and what didn't. It was through the process that was sort of being “drilled in our minds” of iterative design that we were able to get the needed feedback to change and refine this project in accordance with the aesthetics that we had set. This, in turn, gave the group a card experience that the not only had the user in mind, but, it was also streamlined and something that we could not have achieved otherwise.

Problems? Issues? A big ole yes to both: Looking back, this group had a very major commitment problem. This group that we had formed was very reluctant in sticking with an idea. Our initial idea was to  go with something music based, then we decided to switch our idea (this was after having a talk with a lecturer about having a purpose) to something involving helping those with anxiety through making “fidget cards” and then switching to something involving idioms, then FINALLY going back to a music based idea but adding the idioms to make an idiom based rap game called “idiom rhapsody”. Our team had a lot of ideas with potential stuck to a wall .... its just that we didn’t see it that way, in a sense we got tunnel vision and basically laser beam on our initial ideas that we couldn’t weed out the “bad ideas”. We continued the developing process and with each concept that we had created we went through the same process of “this is the best idea ever” to “maybe this isn’t really the best idea ever” to “ok lets just scrap this idea and try to do something else”. However, this changed when we neared the end of the project time, we had found an idea in the form of a card game, and in doing so developed our aesthetics we were using, the base mechanics of the game and also helped us visualise the end look of our project. during this refinement process we brought our “card experience” (am gonna keep calling it this cause Ben hates calling it a game) to other people in our class for some critical feedback. something that stuck with me was the idea of a “wicked problem” - something we had learned the meaning of during ICT. A ‘wicked problem’ is the idea that a given intention from a designer’s view might be misconstrued or lost in translation when the input of a human is implemented. Some context may be required: members of the team had looked upon the project from the perspective of a designer. the rules, gameplay and mechanics were easily understandable for us, however, when we gave our play testers instructions for our game and left them to play whilst we observed them, it left them confused and unsure how to play/figure out what the game was supposed to be. It was at this point that Charles pointed out to us that in a real product the creators (in this case us) would not be there to play with/help the players with the game. Jarem had expressed concerns that the game in it’s current form and had suggested that we try and move to doing another idea instead of settling with what he already had. This led to the evolution of the concept we had initially had to a more fluid, better and overall enjoyable play experience with the users in mind all while keeping the core purpose in mind. So linking this back to the idea of the ‘wicked problem’, what we had thought to be a clear and intuitive solution to the problem we faced was actually a “wake up call” to take a step back and see what was and (in this case) wasn’t working and build upon it instead of settling and plateauing.

investigation: During one of your ICT lessons we came across the word Paradigm and upon searching it I came to the conclusion of a paradigm being a set of constructs of beliefs that become the norm. It is from this meaning that I formed for myself that I came accross this term, User-centered Design. User-centered Design (UCD) is a term that describes an end-users influence in the design process and thus shapes how the design outcome turns out. The term became widely used after the publication of User-Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction (Norman & Draper, 1986) and Donald Norman’s influential book The Psychology Of Everyday Things (POET) (Norman, 1988). The paradigm within our group was to focus on creating a card experience and focus on the aesthetics and rules of play as well as the visuals. And it was because of this that our group kept switching our project every time we couldn’t get past the setting of rules of play and aesthetics. In response to the proposition that communication lacks disciplinary status because of deficient core knowledge, I propose that we turn an ostensible weakness into a strength. We should identify our mission as bringing together insights and theories taht would otherwise remain scattered in other disciplines.  Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51-58. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x. In this journal Entman states that we should be bringing in more ideas from others to help one another. this further helped us shift the paradigm from focusing on the product first to the user and how the user reacts to the set rules of play.

What to do in the future? In the future I believe that instead of focusing on the product itself we should look at the user and how they would react to the product. within our group my personal opinion is that we didn’t necessarily think about the user and focused more on the aesthetics of play and rules instead of thinking about the user and how they would react as well as acquiring their critical feedback and refining and implementing those refinements into our idea. In the future I would like to implement this within the groups that I work with as well as in my own personal design endeavours.

References:

Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51-58. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x.

Norman, D. (1988) Psychology of Everyday Things.

Norman, D. A. & Draper, S. W. (Editors) (1986) User-Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction. Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ.  

[regybct-blog]

Progress Journal

So here are my blogs based on this project in chronological order - bar the photos as they were all added last minute Day 1: https://regybct.tumblr.com/post/183080162370/day-1-bct Days 3-5: https://regybct.tumblr.com/post/183223551920/cards-for-play-days-3-5-wed-27-feb-to-monday-4th Day 6: https://regybct.tumblr.com/post/183250423350/day-6-a-fork-in-the-road Days 7 - 14: https://regybct.tumblr.com/post/183543581930/day-7-day-14

Days 15 - 19: https://regybct.tumblr.com/post/183543951280/week-3 Day 20: https://regybct.tumblr.com/post/183544020340/last-minute-rush

Photos and videos of concepts/play tests: https://regybct.tumblr.com/post/183544143845/photos-and-videos-pertaining-to-testing-and PLAY VIDEO PRESENTATION https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wt_1_9DLzU

[regybct-blog]

Photos and videos pertaining to testing and concepts

Idiom Cards (images):

Fully Fleshed out ideas for “idiom Raphsody”:

Final cards for our game RAP ROYALE:

Play test Videos: Idiom card game (images to make idioms (non team based)): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1gY1h2ArIHA-2f5zehYidu6KtjkNwm8tb https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tKqmJR_hOl29uDH9fdeHEoTrcMV_YIvA Rap Royale Play testing: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1r2AFM9Z5sDc0G7fZy_UAuJkyNo3qE7vA https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wVmoRqA-wMbTqtNNQtgeJZtdOmX32xDs https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hNaBFWOXaV4VE-rfjySBfVBa0fjXg7pm https://drive.google.com/open?id=15sIQBvHdOcWcI4_YrflGr32x8knZxf2H https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RM37HR0lWLWkAZ_N3kk7wsXiFZkr_5Ex

[regybct-blog]

LAST MINUTE RUSH

So yesterday (monday the 18th of march) was our last day to fully sort everything out and GSD (Get Shit Done) so we had fully sorted out the game and it mechanics:  - no more prompt cards  - the scoring system was implemented (thats about it)

 We had also sorted out the making of the cards (nothing fancy Grace just printed them and is laminating them .... and this basically is my last blog post logging the stuff done to make our play experience for cards for play

[regybct-blog]

week 3

Day 15 (ANOTHER DAMN FORK IN THE ROAD): This day .... shit basically hit the fan  we went from one solid idea in which was fully fleshed out to another idea as majority of the group had voted to do so... this experience is based as a Rap game. Stemming from our initial idea based on music as well as mixing our idea of using idioms we had created this game. (this again kinda ticked me off as we had a fleshed out idea that was IMO in some of it’s final stages of sorting out the kinks and what have you ... and the team then decided to jump ship again - against what Ben was hoping we’d do).

day 16: To flesh out this Rap game (which we had dubbed for now as Idiom Raphsody) we had decided to scrap the images of idioms and instead make a game with the full idiom written on the card and then prompts on the back (for example if the idiom was: “thinking outside the box” then there would be 6 prompts on the back that rhyme with “box” so as a possible way to prompt the players).

Day 17 So we had fleshed the game out to a decent state but wanted to test it further so we got input from the year 2s and 3s that are also taking the course. Personally I believe that the testing was great as we got a lot of input one thing being a scoring system as to not exclude the players (as our initial game idea had the players that “ruined” the flow of the game to be eliminated) so in the scoring system that was suggested by both tiger and mark: it would be some form of scoring system like golf in which the person with the most cards at the end of the game would be the loser Days 18-19: the only things that I know of these days were that we did another play test with an outside group and they seemed to like it (i was not here for both days due to a medical emergency which landed me in the hospital)

[regybct-blog]

Day 7 - Day 14

Day 7: So we decided to move on and make a “play experience” that wasn’t really anything to do with doing a set of tactile cards. we had initially thought to make the experience based on sayings and phrases and have been looking into changing our statement of intent from helping those with anxiety to just generalizing into helping/promoting “social well being” - as suggested by sangeeta

Day 8: Instead of using just phrases the group as a whole has decided to use idioms and using images of certain idioms to make a play experience (we didn’t really get up to much as we were sorting out the mechanics of this experience and seeing how it would work (this IMHO was very frustrating as it was hard to promote play using idioms))

Day 9: So stemming from this idiom image based experience I suggested that it be some form of relay between 2 teams and 2 of the same decks (which sadly we do not have play test footage of) however the feedback that we got from the groups that did test was that there should be more idioms that use the same cards as it creates more of a challenge for the team to use/create the idioms this was a great idea and helped us further flesh this idea out.

Days 10 - 14: During these days we mostly just refined our idiom game as well as sorted out the mechanics as well as did research to make more idioms with common words (ie: “don’t beat around the bush” and “don’t cut corners” etc)

[regybct-blog]

VLOG

So this was my somewhat crappy vlog *WARNING* not PC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns_HNUE_O5s

[regybct-blog]

Day 6 - A fork in the road

as the title said we hit a fork in the road for our experience in which half of the group had decided that they wanted to make our experience into a game that didnt fit our statement of intent (this kind of left me feeling some form of betrayed) however half of the group still wants to follow through with this idea of expressing ourselves ..... (Grace thought of an idea which we are discussing on day 7) Hopefully we as a group can reconcile these different ideas that we have tomorrow.

[regybct-blog]

Cards for play Days 3-5 (Wed 27 Feb to Monday 4th March)

Day 3: On this day we had hit a wall with our initial project (musical cards) and because of this we had hit some sort of a slump and we were kind of demotivated towards what we were doing (personally I believe that the lack/loss of motivation was due to the fact that our initial project didnt have a propper purpose/ intention for it)

After a few minutes (by few i mean half an hour or so) of going on multiple tangents. we had come up with a new idea with which had a legitimate drive for our intention/ purpose. this idea was to create a set of cards that didn’t necessarily facilitate Play... the experience that we had come up with stems from the fact that i was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and due to this our experience involves ways that help people cope with their anxiety

Day 4: On day 4 we made what i dub the “great” wall of ideas. this was created when under the STFU aka the shut the fuck up excercise ran by charles, this excercise was fun as all we did was write random ideas based on our experience (mostly verbs) i may or may not have injured my hand by slapping my idea on the wall to hard ... hahahaha *nervous laughter*

day5: On this day we had further evolved our idea from solely making a dissolvable tea card to making more things like a card that when squeezed/rubbed gives off certain scent such as lavender as it has been proven to be a sent that soothes. Photos will come later

[regybct-blog]

Day 1 Bct

Card experience planning taken from our group shared google doc in which this is our initial planning.

[regybct-blog]

Thing that Represents me

So this is from my Sketch book (which I have dubbed the big book of B***s**ery) I also Showed The little of what was in the book. When one Person saw my book they thought i was organised as well as Creative. and their thoughts towards this drawing was that it was a naturesque  organic drawing. another person saw this book and Thought that I was a creative. along with this Their Feelings toward this piece is that it was Organic/ Abstract