#assignment_4

[connective-environments-fall2020]

Gamification: Assignment 4

In order to create a truly successful interactive installation, one needs to consider the emotional effect that the piece may have, a truly successful designer would design the piece to create a specific emotional environment. For my project, the intention is to generate feelings of joy as well as staving to create a form of trust between the controller and the participant. The best way to achieve this goal is to incorporate a level of Gamification within the piece, creating a goal to be reached within the piece, while also providing positive feedback for a successful run, and providing negative feedback for a fail state. By doing this, the piece starts to become a game and attracts people to use it in its intended way.

Gamification

In essence, Gamification is the process of adding game-design elements to non-game contexts in order to improve user engagement and in a way, make theses contexts more fun to use or interact with. The concept itself is closely related to the field of video games, this is because video games are extremely engaging thus, one should be able to utilize some elements from game design in order to craft a more engaging context for things outside of video gaming. When incorporating gamification into a project one can start by identifying the three elements that a gamified system must engage, the motivation to do an action, the ability to carry out the action, and a trigger to complete the action. Certain motivators can be used to help reinforce these elements, motivators such as: rewards, loss aversion, status, competition, reputation, and feedback.

Trust

Another key aspect of my design is the idea of trust between participants. In many ways, trust is the most successful form of understanding between people, if you can rely on other people this means that you have a deeper understanding of those people. This concept plays a large role in businesses and workplaces as a means of creating a more efficient and pleasant working environment. There are certain activities that these companies use in order to build trust within their workers, my intention is to include aspects of theses exercises within my piece in order to create a feeling of trust between the participants. One of these exercises is called “Minefield”, in this exercise a field of obstacles is layer out and one participant is tasked with walking through this course while blindfolded, the role of the other participants is to lead this person through the course verbally. By doing this, the blindfolded participant must rely on the other participants in order to succeed.

[connective-environments-fall2020]

Field of Lights: Assignment 4 Inspiration

In doing research for assignment 4, I came across a few projects that were quite inspirational. I’m going to go into some detail on them to explain why they may become useful to me while I continue working on this project.

Project 1: 

White Noise White Light - Höweler + Yoon

This project consists of a 50′ x 50′ field of fiber optic lights as well as speakers. The intention of the design is to respond to the movement of people through the space. At first glance it appears to be a static field of lights, once people start to move through it, the appearance begins to change as the fiber optics move around and make light trails through the sky. Alongside the movement of the lights, each node has a speaker which plays white noise when interacted with. The combination of both of these elements makes a dynamic environment that changes based on the amount of people as well as the type of movement within the space.

Project 2:

Dune - Studio Roosegaarde

This project similarly consists of a field of lights which are designed to be interacted with. The difference is that these are designed to be placed along existing paths and corridors, attempting to have a dialogue with nature and context. Through a combination of lights and soft sounds, this project creates a certain emotional atmosphere, a certain serenity and peacefulness. When creating a project so ingrained with the human experience, one needs to be aware of the emotional quality that is created and the emotional quality that they intended to create.

[sxnyng]

Nike’s use of Social Media

Nike has a visibly strong presence on Facebook (See: Nike’s Facebook), with a whopping 26.9 million ‘likes’ on its main corporate account. Besides the main account, it has several sub-accounts that cater to a particular category of the brand, such as NikeWoman (Women’s apparel and shoes), NikeCourt (Tennis), Nike Skateboarding, etc. Each account easily boasts at least a million ‘likes’. The look and feel of the pages of the different accounts are consistent. They comprise of videos that share stories of great athletes, accompanied by “inspirational” captions.

“The only person that’s going to have power over me, is me.”

“The court is calling. Always answer.”

Their brand slogan “Just Do It.” is echoed, implicitly and explicitly, over and over through its posts, thus conveying a consistent brand story and image. 

From Nike’s Facebook profile, it is evident that the company emphasizes on the use of social media marketing, and is doing a fantastic job at it. A look at the various accounts shows that they have been fairly active, their latest updates being early this month.

However, for the purpose of this assignment and my subsequent analysis, I would focus on Nike’s main corporate account. The last post was dated 1st September this year, and there has been minimal activity since then. The months of June, July and August seem to be the most active in posts. There were 6 posts in June, 7 posts in July, peaking in August with 15 posts. Every other month only sees around 2 to 3 posts each month. A likely reason for the spike in the number of posts towards August could be due to the 2016 Rio Olympics; Nike featured several Olympic athletes, such as Simon Biles and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, in its videos.

Pertaining to the Facebook page, Nike uses a lot of visuals in the form of videos. The captions are kept short and succinct; this allows the videos to fill the audience’s visual field, greater grasping the audience’s attention. There is a use of “conversational voice”, with the use of contractions and simple, short sentences. I believe the way it crafts its posts is to cater to its target audience, them being mainly young athletes. The attention span of the younger crowd is relatively short, and visual aids appeal more compared to wordy posts. Nike is also fond of including quotes in its captions, which are often the words spoken by the people featured in its videos. It increases the emotional appeal of the message because it is as if the characters in the videos are speaking to the audience.

Comparing Nike’s Facebook account to Adidas (See: Adidas’ Facebook), a close competitor in the sports apparel industry, they are very similar in that they mainly cosist of compelling visuals and videos.

I would say, though, that Nike has a stronger ability in its branding on Facebook as there is strong consistency in expressing its brand story and essence of the company (“Just Do It”) through its Facebook posts. Adidas, on the other hand, has a congruent image on Facebook, but its Facebook posts speak nothing of its slogan (“Impossible is nothing”), and does not convey a consistent message.

[aniquevv-blog]

Presenting yourself as good as possible

If you are surfing the internet, you can almost get depressed of all the beautiful and nice things you can find there about others. Everyone looks so great and kind on the internet: people share the prettiest vacation pictures on Instagram; they share what they have all reached in their lives on Facebook; they are really funny and sharp on Twitter; they have the best CV on LinkedIn; and they have the nicest friends and are always partying, what you can see on Snapchat. People only share the best sides of themselves and it looks like they never feel bad or go through bad things. People always present themselves better than they are on social networking sites and I think the reason for this is that people can actually influence how other people perceive them. In face-to-face interactions we cannot always control this, because we are also communicating by our nonverbal behavior and sometimes we send nonverbal signals which are different from the way we want to be perceived (Hargie, 2011).

Most of the time I catch myself on doing it, on presenting myself in a good way on social networking sites. All the things I have described above, I am doing it myself. I post pretty (vacation) pictures on Instagram; I share that I have got my driver’s license on Facebook; and I share partying pictures with my crazy friends on Snapchat. Just like everyone else is doing. I am noticing that if I am having a busy period on school and because of that, not doing many nice things, I remain silent on social media. So when I had vacation, I was posting regularly on Facebook and Instagram. I think I was doing that, because I wanted to show other people what a nice time I was having on my vacations with my friends and family. Besides that, everyone is always sharing their vacation pictures and stories, so I didn’t want to stay behind and didn’t want to let it look like I wasn’t having a nice vacation. This also has to do with the shared context of Facebook and Instagram. Shared context is one of the three key factors associated with computer-mediated communication and consists of norms, rules, procedures and languages, which are known by each member of a community, in this case a social networking site (Ellison, Hancock & Toma, 2011). In the case of Instagram the shared context is beautiful pictures that can be made even prettier by some filters. So as a result of this shared context everyone, and also me, is presenting themselves in a good way, or perhaps even in a better way than they really are.

Besides the fact that I am sharing nice and fun moments on my social media, I (unconsciously) share sometimes things where I stand for or what describes my identity on my Facebook page. I share these things by liking Facebookpages and I have written unconsciously between brackets, because I like these pages most of the time to receive more information about the topic and not because I want to let other people know that I like that kind of stuff. Some good examples are the pages Stichting StopALS.nu, de Viergang (my gym), Frustraties van Kassamedewerkers (Frustrations of cashiers) and JaofNee. Even though it was not my intention, I reveal a lot about my identity by liking these pages. Individual identities are constructed around roles and I show some roles that I am with these pages. I show for example that I am a cashier at a supermarket and that I am a donor.

So now I have told about how I present myself on social media and the reasons behind these presentations, it is your turn to think about how you present yourself! Do you share only nice things on social networking sites or do you also share the moment you are feeling bad?

Sources:

Ellison, N. B., Hancock, J. T., & Toma, C. L. (2012). Profile as promise: A framework for conceptualizing veracity in online dating self-presentations. New Media & Society, 14, 45-62.

Hargie, O (2011). Skilled interpersonal communication: Research, theory and practice. London: Routledge

[miriamlott-blog-blog]

The Name On My Coffee Cup - Illustration

This article written by Said Sayrafiezadeh describes how a person's name can be a representation of themselves. Examples are given to explain that a name can even have weight in future job prospects, especially if the name has strong ethnic features. A name can potentially define you without knowing who you actually are. To represent this, various sizes of coffee cups blend together, each representing a separate ethnicity, featuring each person's mouth. This adds the element of diversity, as people of all ages and backgrounds attend Starbucks and are all prone to being defined by their name throughout their life- which can include experiencing something as simple as having their name written incorrectly on their coffee cup.