Project 2.2 The UX of Conversation

Brief: Completely change the topic, and redo the whole design process

Group Partners: Lining Zhang, Jiayao Zhang, Chun Li

After the tutorials from the course leader, we decided to give up what we've done. Looking for something related to our daily lives, we can observe and record.

Observation:

We went to TATE Modern and observing people who are looking at the artwork, what did they do when they in the gallery.

What did we find?

Even people are in the gallery and surrounding by artworks; they still cannot get rid of their phones. This phenomenon was related to our previous work, which is robot slavery; that could be another direction for us to dig in.

What do we want?

Based on the observation, we decided to stay on the topic of 'Robot Slavery'. Nowadays people are more likely to have a conversation with a phone machine. They are less likely to have a conversation between another human body.

Idea Development:

Abigail mentioned a concept related to touch. Throughout history, humans supposed to share everything we had within a group. For example, males hunted together and slid them to females and elders; we shared tools, homelands, and other resources. However, due to the development of all humankind, we started to form the ideology of "privacy." Until today, the internet and technology bring us together but also pull us apart.

Literature Review:

Even DSM-5 had not officially added phone addiction as a syndrome of mental disorder. (Mirchandanti, 2018) However, the increasing trend between phone use and poor young adolescents' mental health had been proved. Phone addiction had become a serious problem in the development of young adolescents. (Shoukat, 2019)

There was a famous psychology experiment run by Harry Harlow, which testing the infant monkey's demand of having a "mom." (McLeod, 2009) The infant monkey chooses to grab food and water from the Iron monkey but to stay with the soft monkey. (McLeod, 2009) The attachment theory had proved that mammals need to have a character who can provide warm, soft, and protection for them. In nature, it usually is the mother. Inspired by this, we think it might be a good idea to combine attachment theory and phone addiction.

Reference:

McLeod, S.A., 2009. Attachment theory. Simply psychology.

Mirchandanti, A. (2018). Smartphone addiction, Social Media and our Mental Health. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/thrive-global/smartphone-addiction-social-media-and-our-mental-health-aditi-mirchandani-b2e9229bd0d8 [Accessed 20 Oct. 2019].

Shoukat, S. (2019). Cell phone addiction and psychological and physiological health in adolescents. [online] PubMed Central (PMC). Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6449671/ [Accessed 20 Oct. 2019].