Contextualization: Building a Better Bloor Dufferin
Design document: Building a Better Bloor Dufferin
By Erin Mittmann, Erin Wang, Jerry Vogle and Ronnie Zhang
When designing and making the Building a Better Bloor Dufferin project, our group’s goal was to convey as much persuasive information as possible in the most appealing format. We thought we should do this by making appealing media, diverse media and views, and got the community involved as much as possible.
To make any art interesting enough to look at, it has to be in an appealing format. Alistair Aitcheson said he made the Incredible Playable Show to be immersive as possible with the audience. And when we were taking in politics and often ‘boring’ details, we knew it would be a challenge to keep the community immersed enough to want to learn it all. Therefore, Augmented Reality was perfect for our project because it did immerse the audience. Our audience would get to walk around the current block of Bloor Dufferin and click on spots to get information about the place they were standing in front of. We edited each piece to be about a minute or less, cutting the information down to be as short as possible. We made the experience as engaging as possible by putting lots of information in such an appealing, interactive format.
However, while it’s important for our project to be both appealing and interactive, we made sure our project was easy to learn and adapt. During the Alternative Realities Summit, Michaela Holland discussed about the fine balance between being technologically advanced and being available to the general public. She discussed about how projects should not be too dated while at the same time not be too overwhelming. Our project is a good balance between something that is easy to learn, but at the same time uses technology that people haven’t really seen or used before. It includes aspects that people recognize such as looking around a space using a phone screen or tapping on objects. However, most of our audience has never seen videos or photos move in real time as their moving around the Bloor Dufferin block. We took into account our audience and their capabilities learning new concepts easily by themselves.
When Zahra Rasool came up to speak at the Alternative Realities Summit, she spoke about how working with a diverse group of people creates the best kind of work. To get her point across, Zahra Rasool talked about NASA’s Columbia disaster. She mentioned how the shuttle failed not because of the O rings, but because the lack of different views and considerations of potential possibilities. We thought it was very important to find a diverse amount of people with our project from the very start. When our community partner, Nahum, brought us the project, he spoke about a plethora of different issues with the Bloor Dufferin Land being torn down. He spoke about how the basketball field was important for large community events, the school for the children, the lawn for local dog walkers, the historical landmark for history and power of the community, the new street they’d build for local business owners, and the affordable houses for the diverse community they have. Because of this, we interviewed someone who specialized and felt passionate about each of these topics. We hoped that seven different viewpoints discussing why future construction was a complication would allow everyone in the community to get on board with this project. We knew any specific viewpoint may not appeal to everyone, but by having different facets of the issue, everyone could relate with at least one perspective. We also diversified the media. We included videos, green screens, as well as a still images, all of which enhance our story. By diversifying our speakers and our media, we hoped to reach as many people as possible and make them feel as passionate as we did.
Zahra Rasool also spoke a lot about getting those who know the community involved in all aspects, from start to finish. We certainly made sure to do this, starting our partnership with Nahum even before we picked to work on the project. He was at our planning session, working along with us as we bounced off ideas, and helped us realize just how the future developments would affect each aspect of the community. To deepen our understanding, we even attended a board meeting and heard from the top people involved in the politics behind this project about why this project mattered so much to them. We got to explain what we were doing and what we were capable of, and a few of the people at the meeting offered to work along with us. They were willing to either be interviewed about something they were passionate about related to the Bloor Dufferin project or put us in touch with people who were experts in one of the important areas. For the rest of the week, we corresponded by email to make sure we included each point. We heard exactly what the local community member thought to make sure that was exactly their voices and viewpoints. Even the photo was artwork made by the community. Our project was all about building a platform for the community to release their voices, and we got the community involved in every aspect to allow this to happen.
Building a Better Bloor Dufferin is a project we’re certainly proud of because we involved the community through appealing media in the form of highly immersive Augmented Reality, incorporated diverse media and people to maintain interest and allow everyone to latch onto some part of the project, and included the community as much as possible by working with a diverse team from start to finish.
Recent Comments