My experience in the independent public interactives group has been amazing. I don’t think I have had such a good academic experience ever in my life. I was always interested in public interactives, even before I came into grad school without knowing its technical term and being in this class has expanded my knowledge and perspective in public interactives.
We started the term off with fundamental readings and I don’t know if it’s because I was just starting school again, but I had a hard time grasping the meaning of the readings (especially Beaudrillard). But after 3 months of applying and discussing in real examples, I feel like I understand it better now and if I went back to the reading, I would be able to grasp what’s going on better. Going on our field trips were also great because, as I already mentioned in class, those were the only times I was able to explore the city and get away from D12. I liked that we could actually go and see the examples, rather than viewing it from our computer screens, or reading about it. It creates a different experience and it personally helps me better to learn and think critically about what I am looking at and understand the user’s perspective as well.
Once the readings and the field trips were over, it was time to prepare and make our final project. Our process is recorded in our presentation that we presented to David and Leticia. Following our presentation, we had a very in depth discussion/reflection of our final again and talking about the relationship between scale and location and whether the size of the narrative needs to match the size of a location and how that relationship changes the user who is experiencing the same narrative in different executions. At one point, we were discussing how the user will be able to not focus on their cellphone but their surroundings and we discussed one solution of having prompted directions that tell the user where to look. This lead to our discussion of what could be good design and what is a good design practice of “controlling” the user to do what you need them to do without explicitly telling them what to do.
The semester went by really quick and I’m extremely sad to leave this course. Public Interactives, and especially our group discussions have widened my perspectives in other topics that I could possibly use in my other courses. I’m super happy that I stuck to taking this class and words can’t describe how grateful I am to have met wonderful and supportive colleagues who value my “outsider” opinion in the Design and Technology realm. Okay, this is getting too emotional now so I will end it off here. This is my final blog post to the Public Interactives Independent Study group of Fall 2015.
See you in Spring 2016!
