VRearth - Individual; Final Movie - Sanjana Danait, Rayna Arora, Chhavi Kumar, Aaditya Shete
Sept 2022 - Dec 2022
Paper & Pen, Figma, Adobe Photoshop, iMovie
Crazy 8's, Personas, Wireframing, Design System, Hi-Fidelity Prototyping
During the fall semester of my Human-Computer Interaction studies at UMD, each student was tasked with creating an app using four randomly chosen keywords, for the INST711 Interaction Design course. Further, working in a team of 4 we showcased how each of our 4 apps could be integrated into the daily life of a fictional user. We took a speculative approach and envisioned a scenario set a millenium in the future where the app would be used on the moon.
In order to come up with a concept for our individual apps, we played a game called "The Thing from
the Future" in class. This is an award-winning imagination game that challenges players to collaboratively
and competitively describe objects from a range of alternative futures.
The goal of the game is to come up with the most entertaining and thought-provoking descriptions of
hypothetical objects from various future scenarios through a card game. Players must use the generated
prompts to write short descriptions of objects that belong to certain societies or cultures, evoke certain
emotions, and fit within a given future scenario.
The following image shows my 4 card prompts-
Based on these prompts, I came up with the following speculative scenario as the first cut of my concept-
"A generation later, people are lonelier and they’re longing to be around friends, to visit their
hometowns, or places they’ve visited before. They now have the power to save these ‘environments’ on maps and
transform their surroundings into places they long for."
This scenario went through further iterations as I worked along with my teammates to develop a scenario that
could fit all of our app ideas. Based on each group members prompts, I came up with the following final scenario
and app idea-
As a group, we were tasked with creating personas that would play a significant role in the final artefact of this project - the 'phone story' movie. To accomplish this, we collaborated together to develop a primary persona, as well as two secondary personas.
Upon completing the hi-fidelity designs, we had to merge all the group members' apps into a single story for a short film that demonstrates how our main character uses their phone throughout the day. To plan out this story, we created a 'Narrative Arc', which is a chart that outlines the film's events, timings and the emotional highs and lows of each persona.
To create this final short film, we integrated all 4 apps and designed the interactions necessary to seamlessly connect them together. We also included sound design to enhance the movie and give the audience more context through audio effects.