Post-mortem

The Grid  Post-Mortem

Introduction

The Grid is a client project sponsored by The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (MSI). The Grid is one piece of the larger Future Energy exhibit scheduled to open in the Chicago MSI in October of 2013. The purpose of the exhibit is to raise awareness amongst young museum goers about the use of renewable energy. The Grid will be achieving this through an interactive touch screen experience that will become a permanent installation in the exhibit. The experience will focus on renewable energy sources across North America and how those sources are harnessed and distributed.

The deliverable for this semester was originally heavy upfront design decisions as well as storyboards describing the experience and a paper prototype to supplement these storyboards. However we finished these quite early during the semester and proceeded to set our own supplementary deliverable as a first pass digital prototype of the south region focusing on the comparison of current and future energy while also focusing on only wind energy in the future. Other deliverables included thorough documentation for the next team as well as for the museum as well as final hardware recommendations.

Early in the semester we divided our team into three roles. Experience design, visual design, and hardware design. Matt and Kevin worked together on visual design with supplementary help from Eric for 3D art assets. Eric and Kai worked together on the experience design. Ricardo worked heavily up front on the hardware research to provide the museum with the best company and hardware that can supplement this experience while he later focused on code and documentation. Matt and Kai also worked together on producing the project.

Successes

Early in the semester one aspect of the project that worked well immediately was our team. We all got along really well with each other and some early museum field trips allowed for some team bonding and trust that would resonate throughout the rest of the semester. We also presented our visual style early to the client and got great feedback. These initial successes lead to future development of our visual style that would end up being the keystone of our experience. As we finished our paper prototype early and started digitally prototyping our playtests were extremely helpful. Because this was designed as an open ended experience many bugs that had never been seen came out during our three playtests that helped our design immensely.

Our ability to make this a fun visually interesting experience while presenting typically boring information on energy and energy consumption, is seen as one of our biggest successes. We also focused heavily on the passive guest. This is a guest that doesn’t touch the table but watches other’s experience. We believe strongly in the way our visuals look in which they help even the passive guest to learn about energy. Presenting this complex data in a clear concise fun and interesting way was a challenge but one we agree we all overcame and surpassed our expectations.

Challenges

Early on we knew we would have trouble with several areas of this project. Because this project required an intense amount of energy data we knew we would have to rely heavily on our client to provide us with content. However after several client meetings and a contract issue we finally had to move forward on our own and start filling in place holder content. The amount of time we spent researching content was seen as a hurdle that sadly couldn’t have been avoided. If we had maybe made this even more clear at the beginning of the semester with our client we could have had more time to work on the experience instead of doing research.

Layering the amount of data also became a big challenge. How much information could we show before the map became to cluttered and unreadable. At what point does the guest get distracted or overwhelmed and uninterested. Balancing the data and learning information with making it visually interesting was something we struggled with initially but since the beginning of our digital prototype have found success.

Another area we knew would be difficult was playtesting. We were working on a touch table experience without being able to purchase the final hardware. Thus we had to find other ways to playtest. Our initial thoughts were to playtest with unity using mouse clicks. During playtests we already sensed a great disconnect in what people can do with a mouse versus what they can do with their finger on a touch table. This was forcing us to make conjectures about what we thought people would do on the touch screen surface. Although our initial deliverable was only a paper prototype once we started digitally prototyping being able to work with a touch surface could have provided us with better feedback faster.

One of our other challenges was the fact that we were a two semester project. We were constantly struggling with balancing how much we should task ourselves versus what we should leave for the next semester to accomplish while also still leaving them with some creative contributions.

Lessons Learned

We have learned a lot of lessons through this project. One of our initial lessons was how differently a museum production schedule is compared to our own. This project isn’t being installed until 2013 and it has already been in development for 2 years. We came in working on a completely different production timeline than our client. This forced us early on to set our own deliverables and our own hard deadlines.

We started digitally prototyping using Unity based on the knowledge the ETC has about Unity as well as the comfort level of our programmers using Unity. However Unity 3D is typically a game engine relying heavily on 3D models, textures and environments. We would be using Unity to display all 2D elements and pre-rendered sequences. This provided a great deal of lessons learned about memory allocation for png sequences and how we can use unity to program such a different type of experience than it was typically used to.

We feel we have given the next team on this project a great starting point as well as a lot of ideas about where they can take this project in the future and expand it to a larger scale. With the start we have given the next team we are confident they can improve upon and expand our vision as well as the client’s vision of Future Energy USA.