Triple Shadow

Building challenges

My major goals in improving on my previous prototype were:

• Increasing the scale of the exhibit. When I tested the previous prototype, most people told me they wanted the experience to be more immersive.
• Improving interactivity. Letting users manipulate the shape that casts the shadow could make it easier for them to explore the phenomenon.
• Making the piece more surprising. A couple of testers also mentioned that more 'surprising' shapes would make the overall experience cooler.

Given these goals, I made a couple of major changes to bring this piece to where I wanted it to be: 

• Doubled scale. This was a substantial logistical challenge, as you can probably imagine. I ended up attaching the sides together using brackets, which worked really well.
• Additional shapes. These were pretty easy to make, and I've got at least one more in the works for this week. The letters-object needed to be made out of layers of foam core because it has complex internal geometry, but I made the other one out of pink foam, which was pretty easy and worked really well. I also attached the shapes to dowels so that users could hold them up in the light themselves.
• A shroud to hide the shape. I built three intersecting tunnels ("the box"), which served the dual purpose of holding the lights and hiding the shape from view when casting shadows. (More on that later, too.) The major issue with this part was securing the box to the backdrop-- it was fairly heavy on its own, so it stayed in place but was susceptible to tipping over. This was an issue I wasn't really able to resolve before the piece went on the floor.

Label

"Hold the object in between the three lights. What shapes do you see?"

Observations on usage

Social character of the exhibit. I noticed a couple of typical dyadic interactions with the piece, which I'll describe as parent-child, child-child, and adult-adult.

A common parent-child dyad might interact with the exhibit as follows: the parent hands the child the dowel ("This is the object, Hannah."), reads the label to their child, then guides them to hold the object under the vertical light. Then, they ask the child to tell them what shape is being cast as a shadow onto the bottom face of the exhibit backdrop ("See shapes? Cool, huh?"). The child usually gives a plausible answer that the parent immediately reinforces ("A square." "That's right, a square."; "I think I know how to make a C"). Once this goal is achieved, the parent moves the child on to the next exhibit. The other typical parent-child dyadic interaction I observed was a bit briefer-- some parents discouraged their children from exploring the exhibit ("This might be for older kids."; "You're gonna break this."; "Let go, Aidan.") and hurried them along to the next thing.




A common child-child dyad (or a larger group of children) would pick up the dowels, and either begin swinging them around or examining the shape at the end of the dowel. These groups seemed less likely to hold the objects under the shadow. By contrast, adult-adult dyads (although I only observed a couple) were more likely to figure out the interaction in its entirety ("You've got to put it up here. You can make three shadows." "Oh you got it, good job!").

AIl in all, I'm not too worried about the child-child or adult-adult interactions-- but the parent-child interactions could have used work. In general, I found that the parents were reinforcing the first interpretation the children came up with. Since the interaction I planned for was not particularly intuitive, but possible through extended interaction, this was a substantial obstacle to getting the children to see the phenomenon in its entirety.

Interaction issues. The majority of users did not interact with the piece in the way I originally intended. Most commonly, they placed the object under the vertical light and examined the shadow underneath it. Only one user initiated the ideal interaction, and it took him a nontrivial amount of time to figure it out ("In between the lights? What does that mean?"). However, when he got it, he seemed pleased and intrigued by the phenomenon ("<laughs> That's cool.").

There were also a couple of users who never even made it to the dowels-- one particular visitor tried looking in the backs of the LEDs, and left after doing so. It was pretty apparent that height was a major factor, too. Most of the kids could only see the bottom shadow, since the shadows cast on the wall were obscured by the box holding the lights.

Finally, quite a few users only saw a square when they held up the object to the light, and stated "a square" (as if in response to the label) before moving on.

Changes for the next exhibition

I've planned a few changes to the exhibit as it currently stands:

Remove the box. I think hiding the shape makes the interaction undesirably complex. It may be easier for users to hold the object between the shadows if their path to holding the object is unobstructed.

Add an orienting handle to the dowels. Users were unlikely to orient the object in the way I wanted-- a handle that orients the object somehow will make it easier for the desired shadows to show up immediately.

Set up the exhibit at a lower height. Some kids were too short to really see the bottom shadow from a good angle.

Change the label. A lot of people spoke about their interaction with the exhibit as if in response to the label's question ("What shapes do you see?"), but were uncertain about what it meant to "hold the objects in between the three lights." I'm going to run with this and see if there are more informative labels that might work better.