M.AD
MINUSCULE ADVENTURE
Activate your senses through real-time adaptive narration + music
HCI Design | Interaction Design | Experience Design
Focus : Mental Wellbeing
Tools : IBM NodeRed (JS+Sql) | Figma | Adobe PremierePro
12 Weeks | 2020
Team Members : Jeremy Hulse | Joy Zhang | Lisa Aoyama
Role : UX Architect | UX Researcher | Industrial (Hardware) Designer
MINUSCULE ADVENTURE (M.AD) turns a walk around your neighbourhood into a different daily adventure through an immersive audio experience. Narration and music is generated in real-time and adapted from your environment.
This project was inspired by a growing need for urban dwellers to regularly activate their senses and exercise mental wellbeing. Urban dwellers face a significantly higher risk of screen-time addiction enhanced by macro trends like working from home.
The project consists of a software and a hardware platform. The software platform enables taking in real-time inputs from the user’s surroundings, such as GPS location, weather, and time, as well as the user’s name and personal preferences, to generate a hyper-personalized narration of the user’s walk based on those inputs. Adaptive music is also generated real-time by layering and stitching music clips triggered by particular environmental inputs. The hardware platform has two key features: it uses bone-conduction technology that superimposes the audio onto the soundscape as an unobtrusive intervention to enhance the existing experience. The earpieces and complimentary case are integrated with sensors, a microprocessor and internet connection capability to enable screen-free, conversational voice interface interaction.
CONTEXT + IMPACT
OUR SOLUTION
INSPIRATION + IDEATION
As much of our modern lives are digital and trending virtual (exacerbated by COVID-19 and working from home), the need to connect with our external environments through activating our senses allows us to live more mindfully and exercise mental wellbeing. Inspired from the phenomenological concept of subjective experiences, MINUSCULE ADVENTURES embrace the need to engage with our lifeworlds mindfully. Through amplifying our senses, our experiences can become the rewards themselves.
DESIGN HYPOTHESIS
Miniscule Adventures help us to live mindfully, improving our mental wellbeing
RESEARCH + DEVELOPMENT
KEY USERS
Urban Dwellers in
Sensorially Deprived
Environments
We started by conducting numerous interviews with experts and extreme users in various sensorially deprived conditions to get a better understanding of what affects them the most and how they found ways to cope or overcome certain limitations.
EXPERTS CONSULTED
CO-DESIGN WORKSHOP
We conducted a Co-Design Workshop with 17 users between the ages of 20 and 45 currently working from home to gather more real-life insights and share our experiences. The aim to include potential users as early as possible and throughout the design process made sense as our premise is built upon the concept of subjective experiences and not a 'one-size-fits-all (none)' solution. Users had the opportunity to design their ideal Minuscule Adventure.
USER TESTING + EXPERIMENTS
Our Validation Process was inspired by both Mindfulness Therapy and Psychedelic Therapy and we used both the industry standard MAAS (Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale) and 11D-ASC (Altered State of Consciousness) surveys to conduct our user testing. This systematic surveying allowed us to gather qualitative quantitive analysis in conjunction with our user interviews.
EXPERIMENT I
Cinematic Living
FOCUS ON
- Immersive Experience
- Personalization
EXPERIMENT II
Signs of the Universe
FOCUS ON
- Autonomous Experience
- User Generated Content
EXPERIMENT III
Customized Reflective Experience
FOCUS ON
- User Customization
- User Reflection
As anticipated, our various users each had their own comfort levels and preferences so combining insights from both EXPs I + II, we realized the need and want for a customizable, personalized and reflective experience. Users can select from a spectrum - Total Immersion to Total Autonomy - broken into 4 Tiers ranging from narration only to theme only and various combinations in between. We tested Tier 3 - a combination of both narration and theme for EXP III. This resulted in an overall increase in both Mindfulness and Psychedelic research surveys showing increased presence and awareness. The results showed we accomplished what we set out to - allowing people to slow down, step outside of their minds and activate their senses.
PROTOYPING + MVP
HARDWARE
The hardware platform is developed to unplug from the screens with a self-contained microprocessor, its own internet connectivity, GPS tracking and memory card. Activate the senses using the earpieces, with embedded accelerometers and microphones in both to generate hyper live inputs. The bone conduction technology allows the user to still hear all ambient sounds. The earpieces will be worn, and the case will be kept in the pocket during the adventure.
SOFTWARE
The current software MVP is built on IBM NodeRed (JS + SQL) featuring specific narration and music synced to specific locations geo-tagged and stitched together in real-time and narrated by a person live. If developed further, the aim is to create an autogenerated system that will call and stitch custom curated adaptive music and narration in real-time based on inputs such as GPS location, weather, time of day and user movements input from built-in sensors such as local accelerometers and microphones (embedded in the hardware platform).
UX JOURNEY
Customize the experience with four tiers of customization, giving users the freedom to choose the degree of immersion or self-direction. The tiers range from a simple, themed walk with minimal audio to a fully narrated walk. Adaptive music is introduced in the more immersive levels.
