THE UX OF FINAL MAJOR PROJECT | BLOG 06

Refine Design Brief & 3 Ideas

14/07/21 – 25/11/21 (about 3 months - excluding summer holidays)

Design Brief: Design a way to be able to reveal the hidden impact of the blockchain.

Project Member: Yiwei(David) Han, Sue Heeyeon An.

Design Phase

Refine Design Brief

Based on the feedback from last week, we have refined our design brief and here are the design questions we have tried to answer. But I found many of the key questions difficult to answer and we answered them very perfunctorily at the time. Secondly, we started to list the unseen complexities in the blockchain and divided them into two categories: advantages and disadvantages.

Answering key design questions (Made by Group).

Complexity Bucket 1 (Made by Group).

Complexity Bucket 2 (Made by Group).

Technical Research - Can we create a Blockchain?

Secondly, if we wanted to tell the story of the blockchain through the blockchain, we first had to assess whether we were capable of creating a blockchain or not. We started researching how to build a blockchain ourselves. I found that it was possible to create a very simple blockchain-based website, but the interface would be very rudimentary and the functionality was limited (currently only voting fuction is possible to achieve).

How to create a blockchain-based interactive website tutorial (Courtesy of David).

Ideation - 3 ideas

As we felt we had little time left, we had a quick brainstorming session to come up with three ideas based on the information we had available and current design brief.

• The first: a website experience where users can buy cryptocurrencies while also seeing how each of their actions will activate the blockchain and have an environmental impact.
• The second: a browser plugin through which users can learn what consensus mechanism each cryptocurrency platform uses, how much energy each transaction consumes, and other information.
• The third: a service based on a blockchain system that can store passwords, to which users can upload their passwords and can keep a chronological history of their passwords and see the evolution of their passwords.

Group discussion about refining design brief & ideation (Courtesy of Sue).

Idea 3 storyboard (Courtesy of Sue).

Feedback Session

We presented the three idea sketches to al and taffiny and found that they had little interest in the three ideas and found them unable to judge them, even though I knew our project wasn't meant to satisfy them, but it was still a shock. On the contrary, Greg gave us a lot of encouragement and motivated us to go straight to it, to identify those points of complexity in the blockchain and think about how to represent those complexities in a suitable way. He also recommended a work to us, an absurdist installation - Linear Alpha, by artist Robert Walker. The work is a dark satire on the accelerationist view of the world . It is a Matrix-esque fusion of four screens, black cables, copper wires and fibre optics, complete with a decaying bull's skull - a nod to the lost writing system. This work inspired the decision to find our own language to visualise and materialise the complexity and obscurity of the blockchain and start doing lots of silly things.

Linear Alpha (by artist Robert Walker).

Reflection

Fleeting inspiration is beautiful, but fragile and flawed, requiring the careful attention of the designer. Many times during this project I experienced moments of bursting inspiration, only to realise shortly afterwards that none of these ideas would stand up to scrutiny. Very often we come up with a great idea, which we think is perfect and seem to have endless possibilities at that moment, and then give up on looking at it in depth and pushing it through, and after a while we realise that the idea doesn't work in many aspects. Take for example the very first idea of this project,  "to de-tokenised blockchain". It's a great concept, but it would only have existed as a concept if we hadn't thought about any viable strategy or contributed any practice. Then there is the current website or website plugin design where we have thrown out these ideas without even considering how some key information will be obtained. This is a frequent problem when we are working together, when we have a sudden "good” idea we are always quick to agree or pass it on. But in fact it is good practice to document it, examine and critique the idea from all angles, identify the many problems and shortcomings embedded in it, and then think of an appropriate strategy to approach it.

Reference

Holmes, K. (2017). A Demented Trading Bot Tweets Absurdist Market Advice. [online] www.vice.com. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en/article/59p9nd/demented-trading-bot-absurdist-market-advice [Accessed 14 Oct. 2021].