How to co-design our digital future: A Proposal

Community Lab 2 Chicken. Egg. Chicken. Egg. You know how Prototyping this story goes. It’s a story familiar to R&D. We Experiences can’t arrive at the product without testing the experience. We can’t test the experience without having the final product. Yet luckily, we have a tool not available to the world of chicken evolution. We have the ability to fake it. We can build prototypes that test one aspect of the experience in a convincing way in order to gain insights on how people might react. In effect, we can kick the tyres on experiences and see whether they stand up or not. This form of ‘experience prototyping’ is really a spoof-of-concept testing in which we asked our lab to suspend their disbelief in the product not being the final thing and focus on a number of key interactions to see how they felt. In this second lab we asked the following questions through four experience prototypes developed by Storythings.

Anticipation: can we build to excite before reading? We tested this with a prototype of the welcome screen.

Clarity: can we make it easier to read playscripts?

This was tested through a paper prototype where Silvia and Dean from Storythings pulled different text layouts for participants through a mock-up foam iPad. Drama: can we communicate gravitas and pacing?

In this prototype we wondered whether we could control the speed of scrolling to dictate the reading experience.

Ambience: can we create a sense of Theatre?

This prototype ran to the core of the project by exploring the effect of background sound and lighting on the reading experience.

We also wanted to gather feedback on how people were feeling about the lab itself. Were they enjoying the experience? If they weren’t, why not? We kept The Den from the first lab as a space where people could take time out from working on the prototypes and write us a postcard with their reflections.