Engaging Others (Monday, 18th Feb)
Today we got a short prototyping exercise: to prototype a situation, where foreign tourists end up in a place where they understand neither the language or signs and no brochures are available in their language. The purpose of this was to let an imaginable design team experience the situation and frustrations that a tourist might have in a foreign country where they are limited to communicating with the locals, ask for help and find that help themselves.
Below is a sketch of a map pointing to a destination where the tourist wants to go. The destination name is written in made-up characters. The tourist doesn’t know which direction and from which busstop to go in order to get there. We tried to simulate the situation where two students were speaking their native languages and it was in fact difficult to establish any understanding between them:
A part of our group tested giving directions to each other in a language that the receiver doesn’t understand and then switching to emojis in order to make it easier, but an interesting thing happened: emojis differ in color between iPhone and Android, therefore the message was interpreted incorrectly. Meaning, the green emoji was sent to say “I am in a green cubicle”, when the received blue emoji was perceived as “it’s a snowflake, she is outside”:
This gave some valuable insight to the importance of avoiding any ambiguity from signs and how challenging it is actually to depict something that will be perceived the same way by people from any cultural background.
Another part of our group imagined the tourist to be in a museum and they made a little audio prototype as an audio guide about museums exhibits. Students listened to several languages that they don’t understand and tried to make sense from the information from some words that they might grasp.