An Interactive Moodboard
Following the advice from the partner and tutors, we all agreed that mood boards could help us illustrate our design's tone since we were not able to manage all technical constraints and time limitations. Corresponding to our project, we thought an interactive mood board with audios and gifs helps to explain the scenario we anticipated. For instance, regarding the China part, we wanted to show how a Chinese antique town looks like and expecting users to learn the ancient trading culture and experience interactions with more objects, so I placed images of architectures, paintings, clothes, and ceramics while added the background voices of merchants.
Moodboard for China, designed by Svaney
An Introduction Webpage
In order to navigate directly and introduce clearly, we considered a guide webpage embedded in the V&A website is necessary, Ines and I designed the prototype containing the context brief, operating instructions and journey entrance.
Introduction webpage, designed by Ines and Svaney
A Concept Video
Furthermore, Sylvester suggested we make a video to show the concept and experience instead of live manipulation in case any accidents happen during the presentation. Four of us played different roles (Merchant Ines, Treasurer Sanya, Visiter Sylvester and Guide Svaney) to recreate the trade environment between ancient China and India. After that, Sylvester edited recording and embedded conceptual functions that can not be realised in the Mozilla Hubs such as purchase and exchange.
Concept video of Silk Road Journey, edited by Sylvester
An Ongoing Journey
In our blueprint, the Silk Road journey is continuing to expand, not only will it include more Asian countries, but it will also explore more potential for connecting reality and the virtual. The current pandemic situation forced UX designers to create brand new experiences for users and facilitated technology development. As an attempt, we believe our prototype to some extent turning the traditional way of visiting museums whether online or onsite.
In the past 7 weeks, our group sorted out a clear goal based on the brief: an educational, immersive and interactive experience with V&A collections, allows the online visitors to experience with multiple senses in both the physical and virtual worlds; we have developed our skills overcoming technical challenges: 3d modelling on Mozilla Hubs, program on JavaScript, mobile AR setting on Quick Look, prototype on Figma and so on; we also have improved communication efficiency by using online collaboration tools and group meeting both online and in-person.
From the macro perspective, the project theme has been set as spreading Asian cultures, perhaps in some way exposes the discriminations that exist in contemporary society, so during design, we considered relatively wider in terms of the age/nationality of users, the identity of different cultures, realizability of technology etc. We believe our innovations are worth exploring worth continuing.
Link to the final outcome: https://hubs.mozilla.com/eytqNiS/silk-road-china-island#