Team

Angie Mendenhall: Experience & Narrative Designer
Thomas Youn: Producer
Rei Yamada: Creative Director
Sheryl Long: Technology Engineer
Hannah Baxter: Props Designer
Cora Zhu: UI/UX and Sound Designer

Experience Goals

> To create community on the Carnegie Mellon campus by connecting guests together
> To reflect on memories and experiences before university
> To provide a quiet space on campus

Technology

> Arduino in a Rotary Phone Shell
> Three-Wall Projection
> Speaker and Microphone in the Phone

Mind Map

On the first week of our assignment, we created a mind map to try and capture the general topic of the experience.

Poster

We distilled our ideas and the needs of our client onto a single page, which was then given feedback by our classmates.

Experience Storyboard

After coming up with a solid idea, I created a storyboard of the experience and overall narrative flow.

Quarters Walkarounds

A quarter through our project, faculty of the ETC visisted each room to discuss progress. I presented the storyboard that I had created and our producer took notes on the feedback.

Questions

It was established early in the project that we would be using questions as the framing device to get stories from our guests, so we began testing early on which questions evoked interesting responses. An early playesting method we used was to ask questions to people in an online server called "Innerworld" and timed how long their responses are. The team also asked these questions their friends and other students at the ETC to gather data on the responses guests gave and how engaged they were with the question.

Prototype

Once we had an idea we could build, we made a rough prototype version as quickly as we could. The phone was plugged into the computer, getting audio data from a rough program, as we displayed a slideshow of our visuals. This was to get data on the experience as quickly as possible.

Halfsheets and Poster

As per ETC tradition, each project needs a poster that represents it and a halfsheet flyer that can be given out. I created the design, with feedback from the team. The veins/roots are leaning into the original concept of "intertwined," and how people can be connected by universal life experiences and feelings.

Narrative Prototypes

The experience went through many iterations in its script. The first several drafts were trying to capture the character on the other end of the line and trying to come up with justifications for the phone call taking place. A team member suggested the idea of a wrong number and I took this further by writing a draft where the guest is tasked with filling in for a missing record in the "record system" for the character on the other end of the line. As we continued creating drafts with this storyline, taking feedback from playtests and ETC faculty members, it lost the "missing record" storyline but became more streamlined and understandable. The character was traded for a more refined take on the concept. These drafts also included different variations of questions as we continued testing which questions invoked more interesting responses from guests. The final script can be read here.

Project Room Set-up

As we developed the project, we built a smaller version of what the space would look like in our project room for testing. The telephone pictured was our clone of the original phone prototype, so we would be able to test in our project room as well as the installation space.

Playtesting in the Space

Once we solidified the technology for the phone, we created a version to playtest in the space that it would be installed in. We had undergraduated students at CMU playtest the build and provide us with feedback. With this, we changed how some of the questions were organized and how the narrative was presented.

Playtest Day

We spent a day about three weeks before the project deadline having guests local to Pittsburgh coming in to the ETC to playtest our experience. We acculumated this information and spent our final weeks fine-tuning our experience before our final build.

Final Product

We set up the space in the Global Languages and Cultures room to fit our theme, including furniture found and weathered by our props designer. We set up the software and sent in a user guide and quick debugging manual to our client. The final script can be read here.

Intertwined Project Trailer

Here is the trailer for the experience.

Intertwined Final Presentation

Here is the final presentation given by the team as a post-mortem of the project.