Workshop Summary

29th May 2015

We had the second part of the workshop session where we firstly introduced to the participants our project and what we want to achieve from this workshop. After introduction, we did a warm up-activity, we asked some general information about our participants so we can get to know them better. Then we handed out some pens and Post-It notes. We gave the participants a few minutes to think of the best way to attract people in the public area and let them write down their thoughts on the post notes. We collected and grouped all the ideas that participants wrote on a big paper and place them in different sections. We asked them which were their top 3 ideas and why. Almost all the participants thought about bright colors, sounds and something that out of the contact would attract people easily in the public area. Those ideas are almost the same ideas that we discussed in our group workshop. The results illustrates that we have a general idea of how to interact with people in the public space. However, the problem is the application of these ideas into our installation and where is the best place to put the installation.
The workshop was a great experience, and I feel that it is a great way to find out what our target audience expects.

After that, we asked them to give us the wildest ideas that they can think of. We received some really interesting ideas such as dancing, singing in an office building, loud music with bright colors in the great court, people running around in bright colored clothes, a DJ in a library and fire breathing clown. The common idea is that there has to be a significant contrast from the environment.

In the end, we got some feedback from the participants we did workshop with, most of them thought that we are well presented and organized. However, there are still some areas in which we can improve in. One of it was that we should ask more directed questions such as “can you give me some examples of what you mean?" or "can you give us a solution of how to solve this issue?" instead of vague questions in order to get more detailed answers from participants. The most important feedback from conducting the workshop is that we have to focus more on how the workshop related to the final project. At last, participants thought that our group was not energetic enough during the workshop, that's probably due to other assignments was due on the same day that we did the workshop, so majority of our teammates were not at their best condition.