October 2021
Group: Tatiana Bohsali, Maria Shuttleworth
Group: Tatiana Bohsali, Maria Shuttleworth
Brief and Aim
At this point in the project, as previously mentioned, we started getting lost in what exactly we wanted to do about language learning. Therefore, upon discussion, we decided that it was time to formulate a clear brief for ourselves as well as establish our aims which went as follows:
Brief:
Design an experience that mitigates language barriers.
Aims:
- Aim to create an engaging, contextualised & personalised platform to help people have interpersonal language exchanges in an emotionally considerate way
- Aim to create a comfortable experience to practice your language skills with another person.
- Tackle conventional language learning methods that fail to include human emotional factors (such as anxiety and embarrassment)
- Aim to create a comfortable experience to practice your language skills with another person.
- Tackle conventional language learning methods that fail to include human emotional factors (such as anxiety and embarrassment)
IDEATING
Following from all of the research we have done and while simultaneously conducting more directed storytelling sessions we finally began making and sketching out ideas. We had lots of small things we wanted to include, focus on or try out or experiment with. In our directed storytelling sessions, most people expressed how important it is to have someone to practice with and that apps like Duolingo currently lack this feature. Bearing in mind my interest in creating something with AR, I thought maybe it could be helpful here. What if two people could teach each other in a fun way by showing each other their surroundings and practice vocabulary by naming things they see surrounding the other person.
Idea of an interactive interface with AR that allows people to communicate and learn a new language. Sketch by me.
We have also considered some speculative ideas like creating chewing gum that aids your pronunciation in the target language and once you start chewing you sound native. This was a response to some participants mentioning their anxiety when practising the language due to poor pronunciation or being scared to say something wrong. I thought this was a great idea that we could consider adding in the future to the design we make.
A speculative idea of having a chewing gum that helps your pronunciation in the target language. Sketch by me.
Being interested in visualisation, Maria also created a sketch of her idea of a room that is created based on the vocabulary people upload. As you add things, the room expands containing more and more things. Each object would also be interactive where you can see the word itself, translation, image, contexts and suggestions of other words.
Maria's idea of a moveable 3D room for vocabulary learning. Sketch by Maria.
Although it felt great to start making, sketching and visualising different ideas, none of them seemed clear and solid enough for us to proceed with prototyping and testing. We all felt like something was lacking and didn't respond to what we were all interested in doing which demotivated us so we kept going back to more and more research.
WORKSHOP IDEATION
As a result of our ideation, we thought it might be a great idea to make a workshop where we can observe and see how people interact with each other depending on their connection. How would strangers learn with strangers or friends with friends? We wanted to see the dynamic and emotions between them and the difference in order to create something that can facilitate easier and smoother communication since we were aiming to create something for conversation. However, we realised that it might be too difficult to do as we weren't sure what we would make people do. We struggled to formulate the task properly and the time was getting short for us to figure these things out as we needed to narrow things down and have a specific focus in mind. We've been doing too much discovery work, so we needed to finally apply what we already have and make things.
Sketch ideating on the workshop we wanted to do. Sketch by Tatiana and me.