When switching prototypes helps you with your own

Sharon and I switched projects today, with Sharon getting my audio-based project and me getting her color-based one. It was helpful to compare notes for two projects that both rely so heavily on one of the five senses, and in fact that commonality led us to develop prototypes for each other that helped solve for another one of the senses.

One of Sharon’s big questions that she had yet to answer was how visually-impaired people could interact with her project, which is entirely based on color and sight. To answer that question, I created a prototype that would also translate user’s moods into three sounds. Then, to simulate the feeling of seeing people’s different moods set up on trees, users could instead listen through a gallery of other audio moods.

It’s interesting that making a prototype for Sharon’s project had me create an audio experience like my own prototype, but I had to think about it in a different way using only the materials on hand. Though this prototype doesn’t actually produce audio, it gets the idea across—and creating the physical thing that users would interact with makes it seem more real.