‘Our emotional behaviour is directed towards adaptation towards establishing or strengthening relationships with those things that contribute to our wellbeing (positive emotions), and to influence, weaken, or terminate relationships with those that threaten our wellbeing (negative emotions). This means that all of our emotional behaviour is driven by relational aims and oriented towards a desired or ideal future state of the relationship’.
- Nine Sources of Product Emotion: Pieter Desmet, Delft University of Technology
The framework was used to structure these emotions.
Splash-team conducts workshops in India that last roughly about a week and involve fun activities that facilitate learning. Children stay for seven days in camps and explore aspects of primary education that are not conventionally taught in schools. Parents give feedback about the change in behavior of children and the activities they were involved in, which helps the team to decide the future activities. We conducted Face-paining, Mask-making workshops at Splash in Mumbai.
(Source: whiteshapes.com)
Messages left by travelers reflecting the time they spent at particular places, with friends. Travelers left written notes / ‘tags’ in space for recall.
Designing the research toolkit for facilitating visualization
We designed a special visualization toolkit for this project. This kit encouraged them to tell profound and detail level of experiences that were difficult to articulate verbally. We also investigated how visualization tool could facilitate social interactions for sharing through collective actions. We conducted the generative session at the StayOK Hostel in Rotterdam.
Following were the items of the kit that backpackers were given:
- A map of Europe in A2 sheet.
- A set of stickers, designed to represent memories of travel.
- Tagged markers and pencils. The blue tag represents travel by air; red tag represents travel by train and the green tag by car.
Here are few snaps of travelers sharing their travel experiences:
Brugge is popular amongst tourists, and is undoubtedly one of the most visited places in Belgium. The architecture, especially the brick work is amazing and gives an exotic, primitive feel to the place. Its a small town and jam packed with tourists all the time. So much that at times it becomes difficult to see the place because of the presence of other people. The city center, ‘Church of the Lady’ , Grote Markt are classy and worth visiting.
Group affordance and possible design implications
Many backpackers including us were unknowingly following others; initially we thought that we were the only ones doing it but to our surprise we found out that many of them preferred to follow the direction where most of them were headed to. This was irrespective of the fact that most of them carried maps and similar mapping devices (lonely planet guide/ smart-phone) to find directions, or approach others to ask. Similar behavior is common at railway stations, ticket counters etc.
Ease, laziness, insecurity, embarrassment, indifference, pity, joy, were some of the emotions that we experienced while seeking help from others for addresses, information.
For the project ‘Connectedness in Travel’ we backpacked to many attractive places like Brugge, Brussels, Amsterdam and Groningen. The project was about doing design research on behavior, relations, freedom, escapism, fun, rejuvenation and satisfaction associated with travel.
We often used to forget that we had to observe and inquire and not wear a hat of normal backpackers.
Below are some of the impromptu answers we got when we asked travelers about backpacking:
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.– John Steinbeck
- “The most interesting thing from my point of view is in the enjoyment of loosing control. The idea of arriving at an interesting place without knowing or planning for it seems to be the pleasure quotient. Or this is what my understanding about the topic is.. so far.”
- “My aim is to meet as many of them and try to know about there experiences, the relationships they make, the ingredients of their most memorable experiences.”
- “Personally, I travel to see and feel connected with the place I visit. I enjoy the transient cultural differences and try to feel and absorb the place.”
