Recap

This week and last week has been absolute chaos to say the least. The Coronavirus has impacted all of Uni after the first case was discovered to have infected a UQ student. This then forced UQ to take a week off where they reassessed how assessment would work going forward. This was expected as a lot of pressure was on uni to have a response to the issue especially with all the students in close contact and the level of international students who have just come back from overseas.

It was pretty scary seeing Italy's number as my sister is currently in exchange over there at the moment and won't be coming back until June. In this time the government has told her to come back but unfortunately there are no planes leaving Italy so she is completely stranded.

Group

In the meantime our group members kept discussing the idea of the dancing elevator that we came up with the previous week. We had to get all our ideas and produce a presentation of concept to the class for feedback. Originally we were meant to be presenting in class but because of the current situation a pre recorded video is fine. It made it much easier to get across what we wanted to say because we could adjust it based on the timing and being able to see our script as we were talking.

We presented our idea to the class and got a lot of valuable feedback. Some of the key points are listed below:

• Dance or use the stairs, you will need to keep in mind that an elevator is also used for people who can not use the stairs. You will also cause some social pressure where people will need to get the dance moves right or everyone else in the lift will need to use the stairs (this could be seen as good or bad).
• Oooh, like the idea of context of a car in traffic! Elevator - would have to be a super quick experience, worth timing the lengths of trips - there’s something interesting to play with there. How does this work for multiple people in the lift at one time? You would have to be very careful about the building in which this was implemented. Bash mentioned an issue with an elevator project at UQ - they attempted something playful to encourage using the stairs and generated some significant complaints from building occupants who used the lift.

From this feedback we are going to think more towards the actual reason behind why people are using elevators in the first place, as an alternative to stairs. This may be because the person using it is disabled or has trouble walking up stairs.

This week I looked at a few examples of similar applications that test social awkwardness and public interactions. The first interaction I looked at was a YouTube video by CityStrokes which involved designing a social interaction with strangers. The focus was placed on an implementation to change the behaviour of a society who has developed around minding their own business and not socially engaging with strangers. It was alarming to see how little people the confidence had to come up and try it whether that be because they were embarrassed to try something outside of their comfort zone or because they simply didn’t have time. Both these factors would also need to be considered in my prototype as it is in a public space and an elevator is spent to speed up people travel and save time. This really outlined the point that this interaction needed to be of a minimal time sink or, if possible, no time lost at all.