The UX of Soil | UX Studio Practices.
26/11/20–10/12/20 (2 weeks)
📰Brief: Design an experience that explores planetary soil dependence.
🤝Group Members: Eric Dodd, Luchen Peng, Tiana Robison Randriaharimalala, Yiwei Han(David).
🔍Research Methods： Speed Dating and AEIOU.
Through the literature reading, we learned that a type of friendly soil bacteria might affect the brain in a similar way to antidepressants, and many metabolic diseases are caused by the pollution of soil, which directly affects food security. According to the findings, I think soil is like a medicine directly or indirectly.
AEIOU
David and I went to Bunnel Fields Burial Ground, Tiana and Eric went to their neighborhood to further explore soil dependence and design opportunities by means of AEIOU.
Soil not only provides storage space for corpses but also is a bridge connecting life and death. Meanwhile, we observed a little interesting behavior that a mother stopped her daughter’s act of playing with soil. In this situation, soil playfulness appeared in our minds, and I started to think why we are spending less and less time playing in the dirt?
During the observation of urban soil, we realized that pollutant is invading our soil in a secret way. With urban population growth and green places reducing, we lack enough opportunities to interact with healthy soil which can increase our immune function and fight diseases.
Combing the investigation findings, we threw a question “ How do we interact with soil in the future?” In this regard, after blending the characteristics of soil-playfulness, curability, we derived our concept to “soil therapy.”
Initial “soil therapy” content.
Our group designed initial experience content about “soil therapy” from human five senses. Meanwhile, we developed a new burial service. At John’s suggestion, we decided to develop our ideas using Design Fiction that was ideal for this situation. we set our design in the background 2090.
The treatment content is listed as follow:
Speed Dating
We invited our two friends named Fianda and Sylvester to do the speed dating separately.
Fianda and Sylvester proposed questions and suggestions for each treatment. By summarizing the feedbacks. Two of the important problems of the project are concentrated on as follows:
(1) Why do people need to do this therapy? Our project lack sufficient reason and ability to arouse the experiencer’s motivation to participate in physical therapy.
(2)Even if the background is moved back to the present, What is the difference between the treatment we designed and the current soil treatment?
Because the idea “ new burial service” involves many aspects that need a large of real data about user demand and user behavior to support and it is hard to create a real experience in the class, we decided to focus on and improve “ Soil Therapy” and only keep idea “ A New Burial Service” on the blog.
Lost:
The same problems were pointed out in our subsequent presentation. Professor Morbakal indicated that we need to understand and suppose what society’s future is like on a realistic basis as much as possible. Only in this way can we design sufficiently logical, persuasive treatments.
Based on future contextualization, We believe that the therapy machine in the future will automatically complete a series of treatments according to the user’s physical condition, so we got the following prototype:
After the tutorial, we realized that we went in the wrong direction. We directly “hold our design in the sky” and pray for the power of automation to help us accomplish the service part which we are supposed to be responsible for. What we should do is to create a real experience rather than turning it into fiction.
Correct and prototype.
Because of the urgency of time, we reserved our aromas therapy. Meanwhile, we add “ soil rain” to our treatment list. Because soil therapy not only heals the body but also has the meaning of spiritual healing to a certain extent. In the perspective of soil affordance, I combined soil feature-the scattering and granularity-with neonatal baptism. After discussing with David, we got the concept of “soil rain” and integrate it into the treatment.
Final outcome
We defined ourselves as a service company providing soil therapy and invited experiencers to experience the service content that we design.
Feed Back and Reflection
Classmates think that we integrate many elements including price, menu, sound, etc to create a rich and comprehensive experience. I have to admit that our team was in a state of exhaustion during the second half of the project. This state is bound to have a negative impact on the subsequent design output，and it may be caused by a large number of high-density group discussion and research in the early stage. If we look at a periodicity project as a long-distance race, it is very important to adjust the rhythm of work.
📕Reference
Paddock, C. (2007). Soil Bacteria Work In Similar Way To Antidepressants. [online] MedicalNewsToday. Available at:https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/66840#1 (Accessed 26 Dec. 2020).
Ke Wang, Qingming Cui, Honggang Xu, Desert as therapeutic space: Cultural interpretation of embodied experience in sand therapy in Xinjiang, China,
Health & Place, Volume 53, 2018, Pages 173–181, ISSN 1353–8292,
Wunderman Thompson( 2020).The Future 100.Available at:https://intelligence.wundermanthompson.com/trend-reports/the-future-100-2020/ (Accessed: 26 Dec. 2020).
