I’m so glad to be a member of the team MEMOPAL! and work with my teammates to realize the initial idea.
Design
The idea came from the third story The Plague. When I was reading the novel, I was inspired by the white/red sign in front of each house. I thought that can be updated into a more helpful assistant which can do things as I mentioned before.
“This board can change into different colors to show different statements—white: nobody in; red: the host at home; blue: will back in a minute; etc. Hosts can leave some words on it for different situations(such as say hello to passers-by or show the delivery man where to put packages down), and visitors can also leave a message or make a facetime call through the board so that no message will be missed.”
Our team firstly set up a google document so that everyone can post their ideas in it. However, when we 6 met offline in 826 on Oct.5, it seemed that all of the proposals were infeasible to realize without electricity. Finally, my board was chosen and we came to stage two: redesign.
At first, I divided the functions into three parts as the draft:
And then there came a question: privacy. Do people want to share whether they’re not in the house with everyone passed by? Of course not! So we all agreed to add a lock to it. But there were so many different kinds of locks, fingerprints, face-scanning, classic locks with a key, etc. In consideration of “showing different people different messages” as well as “being more interactive”, we changed the “board” into a box, which could be opened by swiping the identity cards.
Now we have to suppose there’s electricity or the box cannot work, and the box is working in modern society.
Did we still need paper and pens for the visitors? Was there a better way to show the will-be-back time than changing the numbered cardboard in the card slot?
We finally decided the information is shown with the control of an inner computer, and the users should use their phones to edit so that we just needed to make a few samples on a flat tablet. But colors were very important to convey the original idea (and emotion), so we chose blue( calm and stable) as the sign of family members and green (free to pass) as the sign of someone being in at present.
Group Work
We didn’t decline everyone’s specific job, but I guess I mainly act as the team leader because it was my idea. Time was really limited especially since it was during the holiday, but our cooperation was smooth: I designed the script, Sid put forward many realistic problems and designed the information board, and Lingwen, Jiayue, and Yanran did most of the handicrafts. Although Jiamu was not feeling well, he still acted as the box well. (By the way, the characters’ arrangement was decided randomly with a dice.)
Our rehearsal (Jiayue was so cute in this video):
It’s so nice to work with my teammates, from brainstorming to performing.
The Performance Day
The performance was done as we rehearsal, but as the fifth team, I realized that our work was neither imaginative nor easy to show. In other words, I think we laid too much emphasis on whether it could be useful in the real life so that it gradually became distant from the original narrative and became boring.
The audience also mentioned that there were a lot of questions about this “product”: How to protect privacy? Is it unnecessary with the existence of a smartphone? We need more time to rethink these questions after the performance.
I will put the whole video of our performance here as a “memo” for myself (and my team):
Another Group Work
I really love the work that is supposed to be shown in the library and can make the users feel pain. Their slogan “You suffer more, I suffer less.” (sorry but I’m not sure about that) was really impressive, which may even rise some philosophical thinking. Also, the artwork was really imaginative and closely connected with the narrative, and it was also well-designed to be shown clearly. Their performance is a little bit repetitive but did a really good job to show how it worked.