Project Overview
Team WonderLab is working with Give Kids The World Village to create a preproduction package for a themed entertainment experience that will be completed and installed in the Mayor Clayton’s WonderLab by a future ETC project team.
Our original planned deliverable was a full experience to be installed at Give Kids The World, as well as a design package including our iterations and documentation of how to install the whole experience. However, our team faced several challenges and made some mistakes, both within and outside our control. As the semester went on, it became clear that we would not be able to complete our project on schedule. At week 12, our instructors advised us to pivot towards instead delivering a pre-production package and documentation to support a future ETC team to complete our development.
Our final deliverables are a digital prototype and full documentation of our work. The documentation includes the design breakdown of the experience, software instructions that support future expansion, a complete hardware scheme, and all art assets we have created.
What Went Well
Feedback
One thing our team really appreciated each other for is always being open to giving and receiving feedback. We think that’s a crucial thing to foster a creative environment and push the project forward.
Working with Client
The prompt we received at the start of the semester was not a very instructional one. We only knew we are designing for a circular room, but it wasn’t clear what are constraints / supplementary information we can utilize to design our experience. Our team was able to use multiple rounds of pitch, an actual tour, and field research to fully understand the design problem and the client’s interest. Therefore we came up with a final design idea that our client was fully onboard with.
During the semester the plan for the room has also changed multiple times, the degree of projection went from 270 to 180, the room went from a 16-gon shape to a smoothed circle, and the actual resolution of the projection hasn’t been decided now due to the uncertainty of the projection provider. We were able to change our design and implementation to accommodate that, for which we have received positive feedback from our client.
Design for Accessibility
Since our client primarily hosts critically ill wish kids, it is crucial that our experience can host guests with accessibility difficulties. Over the semester we have used cardboard to emulate the physical space and borrowed wheelchairs from the ETC to make sure guests can navigate through our experience in a wheelchair. We also had a playtest early in the semester primarily focusing on accessibility where we used cardboard to test out the best size & angle of the modular table that supports guests in a wheelchair.
What Could Have Been Better
Process
Our process has a lot of room for improvement.
First of all, we haven’t been able to utilize our core hour effectively over the entire semester. Because we have a team of seven and everyone has different schedules, it was impossible to schedule 20 hours for everyone to work together inside of the project room. As a result, our core hour was very loosely enforced throughout the semester and that caused a big problem in our communication pipeline.
Secondly, we adopted a waterfall methodology of 4 weeks of pure design and 10 weeks of pure development. Once we had a concrete idea and our client was happy about it, we dived straight into development without examining any potential risks. This has caused further problems in our design and playtest.
Moreover, it took us a long time over the semester to understand that our team has different levels of passion for our project, and we hope that we could have set up clearer expectations for each other.
Playtest
Over the semester we have had several playtests but looking back we don’t think they were as effective. Every station was functioning, and kids had fun interacting with physical controllers, but they were just not able to make the connection that these are not four separate mini-games, and the train can travel in-between stations. Therefore we were constantly getting good feedback from them about how they enjoyed pressing buttons and making sounds, but they were not as helpful to help us move forward.
We think this is caused by two reasons. First, the platform we chose was completely custom, and we did not account for its robustness, which led to us having constant issues connecting our physical prototype with the digital experience and we did not have a backup plan to develop & playtest when the platform is not working, we ended up wasting a lot of time either fixing platforms or just waiting for the platform to be fixed. Second, although we emulated the physical space very well, we haven’t been able to simulate the digital projection that reflects the real scale of the experience. These have resulted in a huge obstacle for our target audience to understand our experience.
Design
The waterfall process has led to us not having enough time to examine our design, and a major portion of our design was not backed up with enough reasoning. Then over the semester because we haven’t been able to collect sufficient playtest results, our design has not been through any major iteration after the initial ideation phase.
Scope
We underestimated the amount of uncertainty we are dealing with this semester and how big of an impact it has on the delivery. Looking back we hope we should have embraced more of the discovery side of this project. If we haven’t adopted the process of 4 weeks pure design and 10 weeks pure development, but instead experiment with more platforms and prove them with prototypes, then conduct playtests to analyze what’s the best platform & experience for this room, that would be a more helpful deliverable for our client, given that there’s no space for installation at this point.
Lessons Learned and Conclusion
This has not been a very successful semester for our team but there were a lot of lessons learned through failure and they are all summarized above.
Our plan for the end of the semester is to have a preproduction package that supports the future ETC project team to the best extent possible. We are continuing to improve the completeness and readability of our package and we hope to have a smooth handoff to the next team to have the project completed and installed once the building is complete.