We started to narrow our ideas a little- struggling with a full public setting. With advice from the tutors we realised we could do a slightly refined public setting such as a school, a retirement home, a museum, a shop- something along those lines.
We still wanted to concentrate at least on keeping the fun spirit of interaction design, just abandon The Fun Theory. It wasn't our original theory anyway.
We thought a good way to inject joy into a design is to design for chlidren. We talked about one of Will's previous designs (from NPD I think) that involved basically an eloquent, subtle tagging system for children in schools so the school knew that they were safe in the particular event of things like emergency evacuations, as the current method is not fool proof and it relies on the small children knowing how to behave and react in a scary emergency situation- something that is a little hard to control no matter how many drills you run.
So this got the ball rolling- Here was a problem. Now we, the problem solvers were going to come in and save the day.
We tried to investigate a possible every day situation like this which helped the teacher by gathering data on the children.
We started talking about role taking and making sure the child is back in the classroom/arrived at school.
We were thinking about an electrical role call system that sped up the events at the beginning of the day, making the rolecall into a quick game for the kids.
We wanted to try and make it not obvious that we were collecting information on the children by making it a game
This would also connect up with the admin/office and notify them immediately when a child had not turned up at school. This ensured that the office could follow up quickly, calling the parent to see what had happened- if the child was having a sick day, it would be an easy way for the parent to let the school know and if the child just hadn't made it to school, it would notify the parent of this straight away incase soemthing had happened to the child that they might need to be worried about.
We then talked aobut the fact that for highschool kids this would NOT work. If they didn't want to come to school, hell, they were going to wag and noone could be a damn thing about it. That's the attitude of some teenagers and with their whole 'F*ck the authorities' thing you could never force them into participation in the game even if they turned up to every single form room class at the beginning of every day. (For example- I never wagged a class. EVER. I was a nerd child and was scared of getting into trouble- however, during year 11 and 12 it would be a rare day you would see me in form. I would rather take the 20 minute sleep in and sign in at he office than waste time doing nothing in form. So this system would not work for me as I was never present for rolecall, but I was always present at school.)
So we narrowed down to the only age group who would willingly participate, the official beginning segment of schooing- Kindergarten to year 3.
After some brainstorming on what the designs could be we came up with a few ideas:
We didn't really think about metaphors to help the children relate to it... the animal or 'cute' side to it was really aobut the design and trying to make it appeal. It wasn't from a behavioural side or anything similar. We really wanted to talk to the tutors about the idea first and try to figure out what we were doing. We presented our idea and concepts to the tutors at the end of class.
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