Communication in autonomous vehicles
After the workshop with Susan, our group had a quick brainstorming session, the main topic in this meeting was "the ceremony must be a special event or can also be an everyday event?" We recommend the latter, designing a daily ritual sounded great pleasure. IDEO's project The Future of Automobility gave us inspirations(Figure 1), we decided to design a daily commute enhance the interactions between people.
Figure 1: IDEA explores the future of moving together, spaces, things and people
During the tutorial, Susan and John suggested us use the metaphor of autonomous vehicles, combine with the technology of biotechnology. Another interesting point stands out to me was gesture language, how can we create generative gestures simulate emotions and bring the relationships between people. Our project aim became clearer now: a LARP demonstrating the future commute by portraying people in imaginary characters.
Xommute
We set the scenario a thousand years later:In the far future, the Earth is destroyed. However, humans and aliens found a 2nd Earth in a parallel universe. In order to survive and revitalise the Earth, one group is allowed to travel to this planet with permission from the government for gathering recourses...
Spaceship inspired by octopus, Image by Damul Yang
In this experience, I was considering how to create the interactions between passengers-passengers, passengers-vehicle, and vehicle-vehicle. Since we would do this Larp on Zoom, I wanted to explore as many of our senses as possible to connect to each other in this virtual space.
Interaction design, image by Svaney
Presentation & Feedback
During the presentation, we guided participants to immerse themselves in our Larping. From creating audible communication with daily objects while waiting; activating the spaceship using gestures while boarding; swiping student ID cards while entering; shaping the body in blankets while flying; to creating a feel of vibration with shaking screens while landing at the end. In this process, we did not give participants too many restrictions, apart from using background alerts and slide texts to remind them which step they had reached, which allowed them to use their own imagination to express their emotions during the experience.
Xommute LARPing, screenshot by Sue
Overall, People found it a enjoyable experience as they were able to immerse themselves in the atmosphere we rendered and write their own scripts in different characters, even if they got confused at some points under our instructions. Which led me to rethink the question I asked at the very beginning: how to design mechanics that clearly guide and truly enagage the Larpers, while giving them freedom to develop improvisation.
From my understanding, Larp is a community of building, designers and players should work together to make the worlds believable then develop relationships in stories. It requires Larpers to collaborative pretend with rules within costumes, environments, or physical props (Larping.org, 2014). I was wondering how much more we can be involved in this co-experience process in a in-person environment.
In conclusion, this session led me to consider the engagement in virtual and physical collaboration, as well as inspired me Larp as a research method to encourage users to contribute to the development of the design.
References
IDEA [Screenshot]. Available at: https://automobility.ideo.com/ (Accessed: 26 January 2021).
Larping.org (2014). Available at: https://larping.org/larp-definition/ (Accessed 12 March. 2021).