Playful Portals

January - March 2022

Physical Interaction | UX Design | Behavioral

Brief : Design a portal that is physically engaging and interactive through exploration of innovative and playful ways of entering a space

Role : Research, ideation, concept, making

Outcome : An affectionate personified door that opens upon the user’s interaction with it

Collaborators : Olafur Konrad, Ritty Thomas, Yawen Deng

Demo video of the playful portal i.e. The Affectionate Door

Background + Challenge

The brief was to develop a portal that made entering or exiting a space more interactive and memorable. The challenge lied in identifying what made interacting with a door last longer. This meant exploring playful ways of interacting with a door.

What do we know about portals and doors?

Doors can symbolize many different things including beginnings, transition, endings, and change in general

Portals can also act as a bridge to another world or dimension, thus making it engaging and inviting

The digital era has paved way for doors that function with technological elements increasing the capabilities of the door itself

Portals are designed to be interactive, and playful by creating a sense of mystery and fantasy

Researching about portals and doors opened multiple possiblities that allowed us to explore them and in many ways combine these ideas as well to bring out a unique concept

Project Objective

The aim was to deliver playfulness through the concept and prototype for this project.

The reason why this was a priority was because it was deemed as an important quality of interaction design and it could transform the most mundane task into something engaging and thrilling to do, along with igniting curiosity.

Project goals : Playful, Interactive, Multimodal

Explorations

We explored and ideated on the portal concept through ideation methods like bodystorming and brainstorming through Crazy 8s.

This helped us get a better understanding of the kind of experience we wanted to deliver and further inclined us on setting playfulness as a priority for our prototype.

We started off with bodystorming because it was an efficient way of imagining possibilities of what kind of a door/portal we wanted to design.

Since a door involves physical interaction and movement, bodystorming seemed like an ideal way to kick off our ideation.

Concept

Our playful portal is a personified door that resembles a Red Panda, which opens upon interacting with it.

The idea behind this, was to give the door a life of its own, that could turn the experience of passing through a door, a meaningful and memorable one.

Storyboarding

Child about to enter classroom

Child pets the Red Panda, and it responds to touch by making noises and vibrations through increased heart beats

The animal growls which means its uncomfortable so the child has to try again by petting the animal at the right spot, upon which it allows her to enter

Storyboarding meant placing the door in a real world setting and figuring out the primary users for this.
Upon contemplation and discussions amongst ourselves, we realized that a school would be a perfect environment for this, where children would be interacting with the door, particularly those between the ages 8-12.

We felt that this age group would be ideal as they would get to learn about different animals this way.

The Making

The making of the prototype involved creating a life-size canvas of a 2D model of a Red Panda with soft fabric and cardboard. Technological elements such as sensors, Arduinos, a speaker and a screen were used to bring the prototype to life. All this was put up against an actual door.

The Arduino powered sensor acted as a heartbeat for the animal, which could be felt when the user placed their hand on the animal’s chest. The speaker acted as the voice and the tablet screen as the eyes of the animal. With these elements blending with the prototype, the door came to life.

Takeaways +
Feedback

The final prototype was received well amongst our peers. Many felt that this was a unique concept and if spent more time, could be developed into a real experience. However, we also had some constructive criticism, mainly involving the practicalities of the concept and the interaction with the prototype. Some of those were:

Interactions could be more intuitive
Application of the concept in a setting where there are more than one person wanting to pass through the door
Amount of time taken to interact with the door when someone is in a hurry
Faint heartbeat

My personal takeaway from this, is that I got a great experience of working on a project that wasn’t screen based and focused purely on the interactions and experience that we were trying to deliver. While there were some ups and downs in terms of getting the prototype to work a certain way, it was a great learning experience.