Background Research
The background research of this project is focused on researching about the real-world stories of gender problems and use them to imagine and speculate a story in response to our project topic: Ultimate Equality.
In our conceptual world, ultimate equality means that the functional and structural differences between males and females are no longer decisive, and therefore women are completely emancipated. In this context, we deconstruct the real-world stories through the method of speculative design, extracting the ideas we obtained and use them to build a new story.
- Research -
To better speculate a future society of “women completely independent from men” due to the mature-developing technologies of “artificial embryo breading,” we first collected a bunch of real world stories that related to the ideas in the topic: pregnancy, surrogation, adoption, or human-made embryo.
- Brainstorm -
By investigating and analyzing these issues, we systematized the “production line,” and identified several key issues in this system. For example, the rationality of gene editing technology and the how to deal with "disqualified" children produced by unnatural methods. Based on these questions, we brainstormed and conceptualized a social form that implemented and normalized this reproduction system.
- Conceptualization -
We layout some key words and quick ideas about what we learned from he research. By playing with all these key words and rearrange them, we started to have some story pieces and basic world structure.
Concept Design
In the conceptual design section, we created a story outline and world view based on the conclusions of the research section. We wrote down the story as a science fiction novel and use some of the core scenes from the story as the foundation of our VR experience scenario. We developed the design concepts for production through storytelling, 3D environment design, and game experience design.
- Storytelling -
Read Whole Story Here- Experience Design -
In our story, the main character accidentally get into the ventilating duct in between the display and propaganda building and the factory space. The player can explore the space and get to know our story through the experience of moving (teleporting), observing, listening and interacting. This section shows our design of the experience flow.
The whole gaming system is separated into 3 big parts: starting period, connection period, and exploring period.
The first scene is in the ventilating duct which is under the big ball room with a dome as the showing room for advertising about the customizing baby service to people in the “outside world.”
After getting out of the underground, we entered the connection scene: an elevator which connects the top and bottom world. We designed a few interactions in this scene as for getting inside and operate the elevator.
The first two parts are more about understanding our world and get to know a little bit of our story set up. After getting out of the elevator, the play would enter the main scene - the embryo factory. The factory is separated into 3 parts: the package room of “succeed production,” the major producing room, and the disposing room of “failed products.”
We further developed the 3 scenarios into 5 detailed scenes as we would be building in our VR experience:
Production
We designed the environment according to the story and scenes we wrote. Since the main scenes of our constituency take place in the interior, we carefully designed the architecture structure of the embryo factory. This was the beginning of the integration of experiential design with architectural design.
The underground world with the showroom structure and
zoomed in details of the ventilating dust and the elevator
The embryo factory, including the package room, main production center, and disposing room.
- Interaction -
Interaction Flow in Axon & Plan View
Learnings
This project was produced by a small team of three architecture students. This is our attempt to evolve into the user experience design world. It is also our first attempt to combine the UX theory, game design theory and architectural design theory all together. Personally, this was one of the reasons that led me to move from the architecture field to the interaction and experience field. It is a way to quickly produce and experience " fantasies" of myself. At the same time, I really enjoy the iterative deliberation of logic and experience flows. Even though the project seems very young now and there could be a lot to improve in terms of technical and interactive experience, it is one of my favorite projects and a turning point of my life.
