Column:
Connecting People To Nature Through Board Games
Overall Skills
Product Design
Figma was utilized as the tool and platform for the redesign, utilizing prototyping tools and more.
Prototyping
Analyzing the existing user experience and altering it by creating a new user interface that highlights consistency and playfulness.
Interaction Design
Creation of UI/UX sounds to support the feeling of feedback throughout the application.
Exploring Nature
At the IT-University of Copenhagen, I took the class “Interaction Design” where we were tasked with creating a piece of design that could benefit nature and not humans. In other words, nature-centred design.
A specific site was chosen for us beforehand, namely “Amager Fælled”, a human made nature area in the eastern side of Copenhagen. The site had previously been a waste dump which has since been converted into an area filled with trees, paths, and wildlife.
In order to figure out how to design for nature, we first had to establish a relationship with the site…
Culture and Meaning
Designing The Sounds
From these descriptors we designing sounds that were subtle, pleasant and minimal whilst still having an evocative effect on the users.
For the shorter UI sounds, water droplets were used as an inspiration as they were both short, dynamic and pleasant to listen to. However, we did not want the sounds to aesthetically sound like water, rather we wanted them reflect the auditory movement of water.
From this point of view, we explored various synthesized soundscapes that we iteratively worked through to find the right aesthetic for aquamorphism.
For longer UI sounds such as alarms and confirmations, inspiration was taken from larger pools of water and the sounds of waves.
One of the hardest elements of working across cultures and languages is aligning expectation and understanding how meaning arises differently from certain words, visual elements, sounds and so on.
Therefore, to start off the project, we conducted a handful of workshops in order to understand Oppo, the meaning they gathered from certain words, and how they responded to certain types of sound. From this, we aligned on three overall descriptors: Alive, Intelligent Dynamics and Elegant/Enriching.
These descriptors formed the baseline from which we created the UI sounds and from which we could facilitate cross-cultural understanding as our understanding of these descriptors were the same.
Click On This Link To Hear Some of Sounds Created For Oppo