Interactive Curtains
1st Prize of 2018 Explorative Environments Student Design Competition Design: Wangda Zhu; Yixiao Wang; Yuhan Hu; Anqin Zhu; Research: Wangda Zhu; Yixiao Wang; Carlos Aguiar; Terry Vallery
We created an interaction gallery installation consisting three movable curtains and chances for manipulation of the space via touch sensors. We did UX research by utilizing co-design, user enactments, and user testing methods. Users had influence in the space’s physical design and continue to transform its appearance using interactive features embedded directly in the installation’s material. By having viewers, architects, and UX designers collaborate on a single structure, this work becomes a prime example of art that not only is aesthetically pleasing, but also keeps the user in mind.
Co-design
The result of co-design and user enactment gave us a lot of new ideas on the development of the project. It inspired us to think about the design in a different way rather than trapped into the mind frame of designer himself. We used to think adding four parallel curtains would bring people the best space and interaction experience. However, the user study tells us it should be changed to three unparalleled curtains that would give users more interesting experiences. The ability to make design judgments is what distinguishes a designer as a designer. By combining and learning from different values from users, the integrity and acceptability of design would increase. We explored different ways of unparalleled layouts, as users seem to enjoy exploring unparalleled spaces. We set up a closed space as the first space configuration encountered by the users. We will explore different lighting configurations as guidance for the visitors.
Our last activity consisted of a user study (pilot study) where we invited participants to interact with the full-scale, fully working prototype. Our main aim was two folded: (a) understand how the participant behaved within an interactive cyber-physical space; (b) understand how participant would explore the interactive cyber-physical environment. Yielding qualitative data, this user study was divided in two parts:
We invited a user to freely interact with the installation; in the meantime, a researcher gathered notes and recorded a video of user behaviors, expressions, remarks, etc. Following from the part 1, we invited the participants to take a short interview to better understand what the user thinks about his interaction with the installation.
The feedback from the users was quite positive. We got 7 points out of 10 when asking users about their general enjoyment level of this interactive exhibition experience. We will also get some very useful advice for improving this project in the next design iteration. The users enjoy the artistic feeling of this exhibition, and enjoy the interactive nature of this exhibition. They describe the curtains as “watercolor paintings” and the interactivity as “sensitive, surprising and quite interesting”. The major suggestions from the users can be put into three categories:
- More moving patterns for the curtains.
- More design variations for the curtains (more layers, more graphic designs on each layer, etc.)
- More interaction variations for the whole environment (different responses based on different user interactions)
This study of using codesign, and user enactments to inform an architectural gallery installation resulted in a space that contains three movable curtains that are triggered to open and close when touched. The sensors were placed in a way that allows the user to find the interactions and explore the space without a clear goal and does not cater to the traditional methods of usability; the goal is not to make the interactions easy to find, but rather usable when they are found. Users responded positively to the final model and gave an average of 7 out of 10 in an enjoyment scale. Because this project was done for an installation exhibition, there are no further steps in the design.
