Media Design Program | Art Center College of Design

The Apology You Deserved

People Knowing

Group Members: Chiao Wei Ho, Petrula Vrontikis, Salvador Orara

The third exercise for People Knowing is "Dispenser". Instead selling physical merchandise, we raised it to the emotional level. Our theme is to dispense the apology you deserved. People hear the pre-recorded apologies once the machine was triggered.

What was interested in the experiment was that we made so many different model prototypes, some like a cash register and some like a public pay phone. We didn't tent to restrict the shape of the dispenser, the main purpose was to have users interact with the device and hear the recorded feedbacks. However, during the experiment we found out people tried to avoid contact with the device when it looked obviously were controlled by people, that means if people see strings connected to a computer, they walked away. Therefore, our group spent a lot of time tried to solve this problem, so at last, we could really focus on the reaction of the users.

The biggest success in this experiment came from the intriguing atmosphere of the device and the curiosity of the users. A blinking pay-phone-like device in the middle of a white hallway seemed to attract people to pick up the waiting messages. However, the apology content seemed to be out of context for some participants. If the experiment were extended, we would try different content along with placing the dispenser in different locations to create a more logical scenario.