Low-fidelity prototyping methods are commonly employed to assess the usability of newly designed interaction interfaces. Yet, as UbiComp and AI solutions continue to pervasively make their way into a growing spectrum of everyday settings, it is increasingly crucial to shift the focus beyond such individual interactions. Instead, future design and prototyping methods will need to factor in the broader context of use by placing the spotlight on the interplay between new solutions and the worlds they might inhabit.
Objectives
By portraying hypothetical solutions as embedded components of a broader socio-technical ecosystem, rather than as isolated prototypes, we sought to explore the potential use of video scenarios to help elicit and assess such broader social concerns surrounding emerging technologies.
What I did
I produced a series of short cartoon video-scenarios depicting utopian and dystopian visions of future autonomous technologies. These videos were subsequently evaluated through focus groups and interviews during which members of the public were asked to mix and match the various elements from the videos to effectively build their own preferred visions of the future. My responsibility was to design and produce the video scenarios, carry out user studies and do a qualitative analysis of the collected data. The project ended up receiving the “Best Design Research Method” award at the 2019 CHI conference.
Workflow
Each scenario was initially sketched out in the form of a storyboard before undergoing several rounds of improvements based on feedback from internal evaluations
The final video scenarios were put together as a mixture of 2D and 3D animations. I relied primarily on Cinema 4D, Photoshop and After Effects during their production.
The use of these videos allowed us to not only portray prospective interfaces, but also their broader social implications. This, in turn, proved effective in shifting the focus of user study sessions from system usability towards topics such as privacy and security.
A montage of the video scenarios was subsequently produced and screened at the 2019 CHI conference:
