des-Fi
In short
Des-Fi demonstrates a methodology to generate concepts for the future. As companies want to keep moving forward, making decisions to move their development towards a certain field can be a risk. Therefore, I have positioned myself as a freelance designer, focused at providing this futuring service with a HCI perspective. During this project I developed this workflow, with ‘AR for the Smart Home’ as case study.
The core of the workflow is based around multi-medial prototyping. A mix of film, virtual reality, augmented reality and other experienceable prototyping methods allow for easily envisionable future visions. The methods used in the process can be summarized in four steps: 1: understanding the context and current developments in the field. 2: World building, through the creation of a wide set of concept. 3: Rapid video prototyping with concepts build on the earlier created world. 4: High-fidelity videos and experienceable prototypes.
The videos
All three of the videos will use a storyline of about 2.5 minutes to highlight all the different concepts in the future vision directions. Not only that, in the videos I wanted to implement more elements of the previously built world to add to the total immersion and fidelity of the created universe. In the first video about ‘Interaction design for physical products’ I needed to show a coherent and logical story where both interaction standing and sitting down with digital, physical and IoT devices would make sense. I therefore chose to create a scenario around a hobby photographer that
uses his AR headset to make the photos. Video two about ‘Designing digital interface’ would show the story of two housemates that both share some AR applications, but also have some personal. To show the motive of one of the user’s decision to keep an application personal he would have to buy a gift, while the other person in the room could not know. In video three about ‘AI and digital agents’, I would use the scenario of a blog writer that struggles to find inspiration for completing her newest post. All of the videos were first written down as concept, then converted as shot-by-shot storyboard where the framing of every shot is already prepared. Then all videos were prepared with the required props and filmed on the different locations. Post-production was structured into two sections. First a basic edit of the videos was made, without any of the effects or audio edits. For the second part of the editing process, I needed to learn a new program called ‘Element 3D’ to be able to implement 3D objects into a 3D layer onto the videos. Spatial tracking itself was done in Adobe After effects and adaption or creation of 3D models were done in Blender. Most 3D models however, to not limit in time consumption any further, were downloaded from the web.
Experiential prototypes
complimentary to the videos that show a story and the context in which a vision is applied, experienceable prototypes can highlight a specific or valuable part of the vision. More importantly, based on the takeaways from the studied prototyping methods, adding these experienceable prototypes would allow for interactivity to be implemented into the workflow. Combined with the videos it would also allow for the ability to experience a wide range of complex concepts, as the created videos demonstrated.
