Interaction Design

After having set on our colour correction and the layout of the video it was time to produce each individual videos. While Dominik had the task to render the videos - he was the only one who had the right colour correction tool on his computer - Randy and I discussed the flow of our overall video. What dramaturgy did we want to portray? How can we bring our message the most effectively across? We analysed all transcripts videos and came to some agreements, however, we felt like we could not proceed with this step due to the fact that we were missing Olga's translation. We had a total of four different stories from her. Although we had received a short summary of each story on the day of the interview we still weren't sure how she phrased her story and whether there were still some information missing. Luckily I managed to organise to meet up with Olga in the afternoon to work on the translations. After lunch I met up with Olga and we sat down together to translate her video...

As all of our interviewees were talking in their native language we needed subtitles so that locals and other internationals could understand the stories. Randy and I started to transcribe the German and English videos, while Dominik and Ju translated the Hungarian and South Korean videos. Olga's videos that are in Russian could not be worked on as no one could speak Russian and Olga was not available on this day. Once having transcribed all of our videos, could we start analysing the content we had collected. Strong and important phrases we highlighted which helped us to have an overview of which parts of a story was essential for our goal. In the afternoon we set ourselves to color grading and creating a layout for the subtitles. We were able to organise one of the big televisions from the Interaction Design lab which allowed us to test out our videos on the big screen. This also helped us with our color-grading as the television screen showed a different strength of black...

Due to our lighting and camera preparations of the day before we were able to produce our interview materials at a fast pace. While Dominik and Randy began interviewing our first candidate, Ju, I went out around the Design Departments of the ZHdK to gather as many internationals as possible. We had only been able to set a concrete time  in the afternoon with Adri, who we had interviewed previously, and had therefore a whole day to fill. By asking friends to introduce me to internationals within their department I quickly was able to meet new people I had never come across before - this included Emma from the United States and Olga from Russia. By the end of the day, we had gathered a total of 6 internationals who we could interview - all of different nationalities. This supported our intentions of showing the diversity within the Toni Areal and included people originally from South Korea, India, the United States, Hungary, Germany and Russia. While collecting great stories from i...

Tuesday was a day of preparations and trials. As our main tool for raising awareness is film, we wanted to ensure that our audio-visual materials had a good quality, especially once being shown from a bigger screen (40 inch). Surroundings We started off asking ourselves what surroundings we wanted to place our interviewees in. Was creating a sense of (visual) isolation the right atmosphere to place them in? Or should we use a more homely and friendlier background - as if you were actually having a conversation with these people? Interestingly enough we found our answer in our Culture Probes . One of the strongest visual illustrations of social isolation were of an individual in a completely black surrounding - the person was utterly alone. Based on this strong image we decided to place our international interviewees within a black surrounding, thus returning to the visual presentation of social isolation. Lighting But placing a person in a room with a completely black bac...