Brief: Design an experience that reveals what happens when we read.
Team: Kate, Tiana, Ziyou Yin (Ines), Binru Liu
Reading is an important way for people to acquire knowledge, and it is also a complicated brain activity. In the process of reading, people will have many different experiences, including physical and psychological changes. In this project, we design an experience to intuitively help people understand the visual imagery produced in the reading process.
Research Methods
We used “Literature review” and “Prototyping” methods to do our project. When we are reading, our brains do many works, including visual imagery. We planned to research the experience of reading riddle puzzle and show the experience with a prototype.
Literature review
A literature review was essential to our project because it could provide a theoretical basis for us. We had a division of labour. Each team member looked for the literature about reading and focused on a specific topic. I thought this method was efficient because everyone’s direction was different. Some people looked at environment and reading, and some people looked at music and reading comprehension, we also had topics related to sense and reading, metaphors in reading.
Also, we wrote the literature review about deductive reasoning and reading because our outcome was related to it. Franks found out (1997) reading skills positively impact deductive reasoning, and those who master reading skills can find important information faster. People with high reading ability can have better development in deductive reasoning (Roberge and Craven, 1982).
Ideation
According to the literature review, we have put forward some ideas that we are interested in:
1. Reading in a contrasting context
This activity showed the influence of environment on reading. There are 4 different environments can represent the 4 different experience when people are reading: thriller, tragedy, children’s book and romance.
Each section gives a contrast to reading. For example, people can read a thriller in a comfortable environment with soft music, cute decorations, bright colour and a warm chair.
2. The mind-body connection when reading
This experience proves the close relationship between body and mind when reading. Experience and reading both activate the same areas.
3. The physicality of reading (Treasure hunt)
The room is a text structure, and the single object works as a letter/letter group. We recognize them as words. When we are working together, these functions enable us to read and understand what we are reading.
After receiving some feedback from our tutors, we decided to focus on developing the one that has the better experience — Physicality of reading. We changed it to be a deductive reasoning game. People could find treasure with deduction and reasoning analysis.
Prototyping
Firstly, we set the rules of the game and prepared some information. Players could use this information to reason the answer.
Then we built our game scene with tape and chenille. We hid the “treasure” in another room.
Outcome
We did a presentation and created an experience for the class. We invited all classmates attended the riddle puzzle and divided them into 3 groups. Every group has a riddle, and they need to work it out at first. When every group finished their riddle, the three groups could share information and find the final answer.
Project feedback & Reflection
There are some mistakes in the format of our reference list. This problem should not be ignored, and every detail is significant in the design work. After this project, we corrected these mistakes. Classmates said that they had visual imagery in their brain when they some sentences with vivid visual details, like “The second box is the colour of blood or rose”.
We think that people can get a better reading experience with the development of science and brain research.
Reference
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