This week was a mix of intensive building and valuable feedback from domain experts.

On Monday, two of our team members spent the entire day in the woodshop completing the flower boxes. We now have four physical flower boxes installed in the space. Having these in place allowed us to better distribute interactions throughout the CAVERN, encouraging guests to move around and engage with different areas of the environment rather than staying in one spot.

On Tuesday, our SME, Alicia Lee, visited to playtest the experience. She provided valuable feedback on both the narrative and design aspects. During this session, we observed some recurring issues we had already identified, such as confusion around the weeding interaction. Many guests still attempted to use the pruning scissors to remove weeds. We are continuing to explore ways to make this interaction clearer.

We also discovered a new and interesting insight related to captions. The placement of subtitles sometimes caused guests to miss important visual moments, such as flowers growing, because they would look up to read the text when dialogue was triggered. This led us to realize that captions can actually serve as a tool to guide attention. Moving forward, we plan to experiment with subtitle positioning as a way to subtly direct where guests look within the space.

On Wednesday, we were fortunate to host visitors from Seniors Blue Book, a local organization connected to the dementia caregiving community. We had reached out to them earlier in the semester to build connections with professionals in this field, and their visit provided valuable perspectives grounded in real-world experience. The playtest went well, and they shared useful insights and resources that we can incorporate into our pamphlet to strengthen its informational value.

Finally, Spring Carnival is happening this weekend! Our team is taking a short break during this time to recharge before heading into the final stretch of the project.