Brief: To design an artefact which expresses the experiential qualities of gravity.
Group: Chenguang, Jiayi, Amber Lau, Zain, Tanvi.
The earth’s gravitational force has fashioned our sense of the everyday. Getting inspired from the abstract forms of gravity, Chenguang had a really interesting approach, ‘How is evolution affected by gravity?’. I particularly really liked this approach, but the team thought it was very abstract. We instead had a design opportunity on playgrounds and we chose to focus on how mass and speed affect gravity.
Individually going to the playgrounds, we jotted down our observations of children playing with the facilities with respect to their centre of gravity. We examined the different swings and slides and how they work. The two research methods for this project were- Body storming and Behaviour mapping.
Body storming
Body storming is a method which requires the participants to assume a role in the environment you are designing for. For us, ideally, this environment was the playground. We each assumed a role, either of a kid, or a facility and re-enacted the scenes from the playground which we had observed. As I was lighter in weight, the team preferred me to assume the role of a child.
Putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes really helped us understand how a child would think. This made us observe that a child does not care about breaking things, and they are not conscious about theirselves while playing. This method also made us realise how gravity works on our bodies.
While body storming, we realised how the centre of gravity changes while playing on these facilities. Your legs may feel that they are experiencing micro gravity but because the centre of gravity has shifted, another part of your body, like the hands, feels all the weight.
Behaviour mapping
For the next step of behaviour mapping, we went to the playground again to observe how people behave with respect to the space and time. We struggled a bit with this at the start as we did not have a certain set of parameters to map. After a short discussion with our course tutors, we realised we should ideally map the speed and weight. We each chose people to map, mostly consistent of kids. We mapped out the age group, approximate weight as well as how speed was affected due to this. We were more interested in how the centre of gravity changes according to someones weight. We observed a swing which requires 3 people to work. This swing required team work as the weights have to be coherent.
After we had mapped out the area and the behaviour of people, we had to turn the findings into a 3d model. I chose to do this by marking down the age group, and what kind of circles they make while playing this facility. These patterns were very interesting as they were all very different. These patterns depended on the different weights of the people playing. The person with more mass stayed closer to the pole, whereas the person with lesser weight was further away. This resulted in none of the patterns being a perfect circle, but rather ovals and parabolas.
Final presentation
For the final presentation, we decided to build a game which works on weight distribution and the centre of gravity. We built a marble game inspired by the patterns which we observed while behaviour mapping.
The objective of the game was to get the marble go down in the maze with the help of your weight and with no help from your hands. We asked the class for 3 volunteers.
Feedback and takeaways
Our tutors really liked the idea but they commented on the way we presented the game. It would have been better if we had thought of the placement of the artefact. John suggested that it could have been on top of the table so it could be properly displayed.
Our classmates enjoyed playing the game, their comments were that the game was too hard to play. We could have made it a bit easier by not having cavities in it.
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