The Beginning!

The first week at MediaLAB consisted of getting to know each other and developing team-building skills. We had a fun workshop called “Tinkering” where we used different tools for example Makey Makey and Little Bits to develop rapid electronic prototypes. Using these tools provided us with the ability to physically test concepts. They allowed us to test a concept really quickly to see whether it would work or not. This will be useful for future projects. Our prototype revolved around an interactive museum installation that worked with sound, light and data to tell a story. The idea was to create a sensory experience for the user to explore the EHRI data in a personal way. It was great practice for our team in collaborating to create a physical result. We can use these skills in our next project.

Our next task was called the User Scene Challenge. The goal of this challenge was to create an emotional connection with our user’s pain points by depicting their conflict in a short scenario. We had a lengthy ideation phase where we all contributed ideas and ended up with an amalgamation of our best ideas. The conflict we conveyed in the film is the difficulty accessing information on the Holocaust. This could be for many reasons for example, the user must be an academic/affiliated with an institution to access the information or the user might have to pay a costly membership fee etc. We have represented this conflict by depicting a user in the dark reaching for a light and being unable to grasp it before the light goes out.