The UX of Sensory Experiences
- Irene (Shiyin Zheng)
- Oct 13, 2018
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 3, 2019
The UX of Sensory Experiences
Team
Yixuan Wang
Irene (me)
Experience
Before we started the formal experience, we went around the station to start our first experience. At first Patrick and I grouped together and we decided to focus on "time" experience, but because of Yixuan's poor English and difficulty with communicating, we ended up me grouping with Yixuan and Patrick with Nat.
We went through the station and use the time we spent between each spot to experience the place. We started from the coffee shop and I suggested that we decided on some points together, so we could compare the time we used. I drew a map using lines expressing my feeling, and the points mean the counting points. Then Yixuan wrote her time onto the map.
We had two main sensory experiences that day. One was the cable which was in air and in a extremely quite environment. The other was the tunnel, in the underground, using hundreds of lights for illumination. Both two were a straight-line journey and they allowed us to keep away from the distraction and experience the journey in a pure mind.
For us, we insisted on using time to record the whole journey, and we made a sensory map based on this. It was the same counting spot, but we had different length of time because of paces, attention… It was an overlap of different time perception of two persons.
Time
We did some research on time and found that there are basically three kinds of models explaining how people perceive time, the strength model, the inference model and the biological stopwatch. We also did research on temporal illusions of time.
Concept
We thought about how to visualise time and if can we actually see time. Then suddenly it came to my mind that in many scientific movies, we can, in a four-dimensional world. We could abstract time by making each certain amount of time a cube. Every moment is like a cube, but we have different perception of the cube because of different feelings of the time. The cube, which is also the moment, is abstracting how we perceive itself by its shape, length and other transformation. The moment could be reordered, compressed & expanded, damaged … according to varied time perception. So does the cube.
Next, I concluded the traits of time illusions. Feelings of time when faced with time illusions could be:
A misunderstanding of the time sequence
A shortened/prolonged feeling of the time
How deep the impression of the time is
A collapse of time
We corresponded each of these feelings to an physical form.
The sequence is reflected by the colours: The actual sequence of time is the original rainbow colour but it is now in a mess.
The length feeling of the time is shown by the thickness of the cubes: the thicker the cube is, the longer you are feeling the time is.
How deep the impression is the time gave you is shown in the wideness of the cube.
The destruction of the time is reflected by destructive cubes caused by varied types of damage: like cutting and squeezing.
Then we calculated and decided how we were going to make this in a logical way. We used coloured foam boards and cut them in a specific size. Then we sticked them together to make different cubes, did corresponding things to each of the cubes and connected all the cubes using same-colour nails and strings on the top.
We also put water underneath to make it float, expressing an unstable and unsafe feeling of the person.
Background soundtracks
I also suggested we could make a background voice, using the same method. The sound was made in Audition by me, and there were eight sound tracks in total. In each of the sound tracks, the sound was the same, a "tik-tok" sound imitating the clock. However, this original sound in each of the soundtrack was speeded up or pitched up or volumed differently to mix together.
soundtracks
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