SLAVI KALOFEROV

User Experience Researcher

UX OF MOULD – WEEK 2

We designed a human experience of a product that is getting mouldy.

Brief

Design a way to materialise the qualities of mould

Teammates

Anushka Motiani, Hong Zhou, Roshni Suri and Harry Solomons

Methods

AEIOU, Love and Breakup letters

Timeframe

13.10 – 27.10.2022

Development

We revisited the AEIOU exercise splitting each section to each one of the team to conduct research in their kitchen to ground our prototype in a real context, we had to revisit our AEIOU exercise.

Despite the relative similarities, in my opinion, this might not have been the best approach because there are some differences in each kitchen set-up which would call for different behaviours.

Activities research in the kitchen from AEIOU exercise
Environment research in the kitchen from AEIOU exercise. Credit: Harry Solomons
Interactions research in the kitchen from AEIOU exercise. Credit: Roshni Suri
Interactions research in the kitchen from AEIOU exercise. Credit: Hong Zhou
Users research in the kitchen from AEIOU exercise. Credit: Anushka Motiani

What stood out the most to us was the story of forgotten food products in the fridge that got mouldy over time. Therefore, our idea for our project was to put the participant in the place of the moulding product in the fridge.

For this goal we had to answer the question:

How do we put a person into the point of view of a forgotten food product in the fridge?

Group discussion. Photo credit: Roshni Suri

Based on the insights from our AEIOU exercise and our understanding of mould so far, we created a list of materials that we thought are easily accessible to us and can emulate or were close to the features of mould. Some of the materials we came up with were cotton and flour.

Replicating mould with cotton and flour
Creating different types of mould with cotton and watercolour paints. Photo credit: Roshni Suri

We took onboard the advice of Tonicha Child to try to overload the human senses. This made us think about all the senses and the conditions around our experience. We thought of moisturisers and hairdryers as tools that can create warm and moist conditions which we planned to combine with no light in the room.

Moisturiser covered with a bag
Testing the humidity created by the moisturiser

One of the biggest challenges for our idea was that mould takes so much time to become visible. For that, we thought of shooting a video from inside a fridge. We planned it by storyboarding it and then Anushka shot the video from her fridge. We worked around the issue of time by making our video appear as a time-lapse by further emphasising the effect of the day counter on the top.

Still from the short video we created: Moulding product in the fridge. Credit: Harry Solomons

To try to make the people take the perspective of our products we gave them labels what their product is and also the physical real-world object to them which we planned with time passing to substitute with the mould version we had thanks to Anushka who was growing these spoiled products.

Box with spoiled food products. Photo credit: Anushka Motiani
User testing the final experience of mould on a small scale. Photo credit: Hong Zhou
A moment of participants’ experience in UX of moulding products in the fridge. Photo credit: Romit Kurt

Where I think we could have done better is to spend a bit more time trying the fridge setup and testing it with at least one person who is not part of our group in order to see how better can we run the experience. 

Feedback

We should have provided a bit more safety measures such as goggles and an option to exit from the experience because at moments it was too much for the participants.

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