Project 1:
Art Center Underground
Gaming as Social Exchange
Project with Jiyeon Song
Description
Art Center Underground(ACU) was a frogger-based game located in a public space on the Hillside campus. A player moved an orange dot on the screen, a graphic representation of a graphic design student at Art Center. The goal of the game was to simulate a student life during one intensive term at school. Blocks were based on a pre-survey among students. Players hit the blue block in the game to gain design strength. Each block represented a thing, activity, or a teacher who may help you become a better designer. On the other hand, the red blocks represented things decreasing your score of learning. They were shared elements from student life. In one five-minute round of the game, players experienced the sensations of a typical AC student.
We observed how users reacted to the elements, what happened when other majors came to the game, and the conversations which ensued. The game site established a social spot where members of the community campus were able to share the their everyday life within the unique context of the game. As a media designer, I saw that the game could be expanded to different majors and even other design schools. However, what ACU revealed to me was a greater opportunity for exploring a genre of interactive design and user-generated content for sparking social exchanges.
Analysis
In a modern community or organization, there are conventional channels for communicating ideas, solving issues, making decisions, and having group activities. These channels have been developed into various forms such as conferences, meetings, presentations, or an afternoon tea. Each form serves a specific purpose. Either it helps us or it fails us. What are the unexplored possibilities of recreating these forms with interaction design in mind?
The media establishes these dynamics through letters, forums, message boards, email, text messages and blogs. Each medium forms the way we use it to convey our voices and to see the community. For a media designer, a Shuffle Space project is not about making these existing cultural conventions better, it is about presenting a vision so that we can feel our community in an unique way.
In ACU, the content was edited by a designer, whose point of view might be the only one. Can the role of the designer and the audience be exchanged, and what we can learn from the observations? The next project turned its presentation from a specific experience to a blank device that surveyed, invited, and documented user-generated content.