Design Process - way finding video

to start of the project we went out to Leeds city centre to capture images of the sign systems used around the area and study how they might create a diversion or an interaction for the public.

As you can see all the images show a direction in which to guide people, or they provide people with information about a required interaction when in that certain space.

As the group activity was to create of video of our way finding system, we narrowed our ideas down to two ways of diverting and attracting public reaction. The first idea was to create a diversion between two pillars on the Leeds University Campus, which we found to have a frequent flow of people passing through. The idea behind this was to see if the public would take a different route on the campus or if they would attempt to cross through the tape.

When arriving at the spot that we had in mind we found that in fact the most frequently passed through space was between the plant box and the pillar shown on the left. Therefore we decided to set the tape up there to test our theory.

our predictions for this theory would be that people will instead take the route between the two concrete pillars or they will go to the left side of the plant box.

One issue we found that could have been done better, was the face that the tape used in the experiment was quite thin and loose. Therefore, had we used a thicker tape, we may have collected better results.

As a result of the experiment we found that our predictions were correct and people did in fact take a different route to avoid the tape.
However there were also several people who felt that they should take a different route due to the direction in which our camera was pointing. Therefore, a better way that this activity could have been done would be to place the camera somewhere out of sight from the public to gain more accurate results.

For the next part of our video, we decided that we would try to engage the public into high-fives. To do this we attached arrows made of green tape to Daniel's jacket to point people in the direction of his hand. By using green tape we were making the high-five seem more welcoming than if we had used red for example. However we could have also tried other colours of tape to see whether the interactions would decrease or change in any way.

As predicted, several people did in fact engage in the interaction, which I believe is due to the fact we chose a location that would be populated by many passers-by, in the shopping district of Leeds city centre. Overall, I think that our experiments were a success in involving the public into way finding systems, but there were also other possible alternative methods we could have experimented with to see whether there would be different results.

Group final video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlN6rlf8-ps&feature=youtu.be