Synthesis
Through the previous three weeks of research and prototyping, our goal seemed to become clear: to create a story containing interactions that would make the online visiting creative, educational and behavioural. Our group appeared to have reached a bottleneck. There are so many expressions that we wanted to convey, but we didn't know where to start. So we took a step back and started to reflect on the purpose of V&A and what our project meant to audiences. We began to seek out one potential category in the museum that could carry our ideas, then classified them by religions attempting to discover clues among them (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Map by team
Figure 2: Introduction of Chinoiserie, from V&A Collections
One kind of collections that caught our interest was Chinoiserie (Figure 2), This was a style inspired by art and design from Asian countries in the 18th century, however, it didn't distinguish between what was Chinese, Japanese or Indian, but combined different motifs together. This seems the norm for Westerners in regard to Eastern culture, in the same way, that Easterners cannot tell what is Gothic, Rococo or Victorian.
In the meanwhile, this week's reading also enlightened us to distinguish and respect differences (Lorde, 2003). Since our group members are all from Asia, we all agreed to develop a project that would promote Asian cultural identity (Figure 3).
Synthesizing the topic, organized by team
Culture Confidence and Escape Room
During the chat, Ines showed us her previous projects, we were greatly inspired while appreciating them, the 'escaping room' concept emerged. Exploring details through games seems to be a way to enhance memories and increase the fun of learning. We introduced to John the theme of cultural confidence and the mechanism of escape room, He thought it was fascinating and recommended that we use the Mozilla hubs to realise the 3d design, more importantly, he reminded us to consider deeper the reason for 'escaping' the room, would it just a gallery full of Asian artworks or could it be a metaphor of a bridge from Eastern to Western.
The First Prototype
As we were all new to this platform (Spoke by Mozilla Hubs), we encountered lots of challenges at first. After Sylvester's first attempt, we found that though it was worthwhile to explore it would be hard for us to build from zero. So I suggested using a sample in hubs by placing breaking rooms into different Asian countries and setting questions in the main room to complete the 'unlocking' mechanism.
Through discussion, Ines and I decided to set the scene as an art gallery decorated with collections from Asia, ask users to find and interact with the right object to pass the game, as well as provide a whiteboard to allow users to share their feelings and communicate with others after visiting.
Scene building, demo by Ines and Svaney
For the quiz aspect, we wanted to make it educational and physically interactive. With an introduction by Sanya, we asked a question about the Indian Bayan Drum and placed other instruments as obstacles. Once the audiences found the correct answer, a link would guide them to play the drum using hand gestures, during which users could learn the proper position and sound of the drum. This code was done by Sylvester and Ines with the help of my brilliant friend - Cheese! Who is majoring in MA Creative Computing in CCI. Thanks for helping the second time!
The interaction of Indian Bayan Drum, settings by Cheese, Ines, Sylvester and Svaney
Middle Presentation and Reflection
During the presentation, people were impressed by our live manipulation and clear topic, as well as came up with a lot of valuable advice to push us further. From the cultural promotion perspective, Jack suggested we demonstrate more connections between the Asian countries' cultures; From the design perspective, John and Al encouraged us to explore deeper the nature of spatial experience; From the function perspective, many classmates were attracted by the concept of learning through playing, and were expecting more educational interactive objects in the scene.
Middle presentation, edited by Ines
Our group was delighted to sort out a design direction in the middle of the project and took a short break:) For me, I felt proud of our effective teamwork. Throughout the exploration and integration, we gradually identified everyone's position by exploiting different skills. Meanwhile, we established goals for each step and controlled the length of the meetings. This allowed us to output our ideas within a time frame while providing more space for reflection.
In terms of the concept, I think the significance of this design is that we have given people the opportunity to meet Asian cultures and discover their unique characteristics. Even though there were still many aspects that needed to be improved.
References
Lorde, A., 2003. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Feminist postcolonial theory: A reader, 25, p.27.
V&A Collections. Samurai: Japanese arms & armour. Available at: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/chinoiserie-an-introduction (Accessed: 3 March 2021)