Brad mostly gave us positive and encouraging feedback; it was nice to hear his appreciation for our concept of giving new life to old class notes. We realized, however, with this complement, that even though Brad has seen our animations several times, the idea behind our work was not communicated efficiently. While bringing in the physical sculptures may enhance the concept, we are open to the challenge that there could be more ways to really drive our idea home without necessarily shoving it in the participants’ faces. Riley brought up the possibility of vamping up our website to provide some kind of “lore”, or “bonus features” relating to the plants’ care and environment. Hopefully we will have time to pursue that idea further.
Another thing Brad mentioned in his critique is the fact that our enlarged plant sculptures somewhat undermine the authentic gardening experience, which actually demands a hunched-over posture more often than not. So too, does taking notes. We are wrestling between either creating visual impact and a pleasurable experience, or prioritizing authenticity. Nevertheless, considerable time has been put toward creating these large-scale plants and it would be a real shame to toss them aside. One solution may be to include both the miniature and large-scale plants in the final installation. This could mean reworking both our animations and our Max patch, a fairly intense undertaking. When considering this alongside the website suggestion, it is unlikely that we could accomplish both. We believe that more user testing can help shed light on which direction to go, which we plan to do when we get back from break. To be clear, the minimum viable product will be complete and well-documented by April 9th, but some minor improvements may be “ongrowing”, if you will, before our final presentation on May 1st.
One piece of critique that we plan to address immediately is Brad’s concern about the intuitiveness of multi-person interactions. As it stands now, our logic for such interactions is a bit shake-y. The interaction animations are 4 seconds long, and user testing has shown us that when two people are both interacting with the same plant, they expect more immediate feedback. Over the break we are going to experiment with ways to improve this experience. One approach is to overlay the animations, another would be to speed them up. Perhaps a combination of both will be the most effective.
Overall we are very happy with the progress we’ve made with this project and looking forward to seeing it all come together. Brad has been an invaluable mentor and we certainly couldn’t have done it all without his guidance and expertise.
NOTES ON GROWING 