I’m Deklin, an environments design student studying at Carnegie Mellon University. My goal as a designer is to create experiences and spaces that inspire and house creativity, while having a practical and altruistic use. I would love to create spaces that reflect different meanings of the terms, and push the boundaries of what we consider for a given experience.
Other than environments design, I love illustration and storytelling, and incorporate them into my work as much as I can. My greatest wish for my designs is that I can incorporate illustrative emotion into a spatial form using the tools I’ve learned and continue to learn here.
A Survey of Presence and Related Concepts:
My main takeaway from this reading was how uninvolved with the process of evaluating interaction and design I am. Viewing the systems and criteria that go into evaluating something as seemingly harmless as a design’s presence made me realize how intricate and complex that evaluation really is, especially in the complicated and open ended realm of environments design. Each different interaction and design piece has an entirely different criteria to understand how present, useful, or effective it is because of each ones’ unique purpose and form. As designers, I feel that we normally focus on the presentation of our work to a community of designers, but presence is a concept that directly relates to the user, who is unequivocally the main target of any design. Presence through their eyes is difficult to self evaluate because as the designer, how can you see your own work through the eyes of someone who doesn’t know exactly what and why it is what it is, but it is one of the most important tenets of designing spaces.
Social Immersive Media:
One of the most interesting parts of this reading to me was the display of the disconnect between two immersive experiences: The DEEP WALLS performance exhibit, and the FEAR game narrative exhibit. Both were built for different purposes, but both presented an interactive narrative, each to a varying degree of success. The feedback for DEEP WALLS seemed to be that its changing size and state made it confusing for the actors, which took them out of the experience and performance they were taking part of, effectively diminishing the effectiveness of the exhibit. Meanwhile FEAR had success keeping its narrative intact, and the main difference that bred that success appeared to be its use of, for lack of a better term, a Game Over condition. While not always possible in this sense, introducing some level of stakes or permanence to ones’ interaction with an exhibit can make interacting with it much more meaningful. Rather than just interacting with something until it’s over, it is more engaging to see the interaction react both positively and/or negatively to the user, grounding the experience in something that they are more in tune with: their own effects.