Hello, I'm Brian O'Keefe. And I would like to welcome you to
designing blended experiences. If this is your first time with
us, allow me to extend a personal invitation to get your
pencils and sketch along with us to design seamless user
experiences that blend digital and physical spaces together.
So, tell you what, let's get started.
In this presentation, I'll cover our plant pals design fiction's
explore what are blended spaces. And of course, introduce our
blended experiences framework and summarise our findings and
thank you for your time.
We are a grassroots team of researchers that banded together
on on a particular cause to explore and continue. David
Benyus work designing with blends. So, Mike master maker
from ENI from Farmingdale State College, Tom Clinton, David
benyon, contributed to this work as well as Miriam sturdy from
University of Lancaster. Thought today I do a little design
fiction called plant pals. I hope you enjoy. There are two
primary characters here, Holly, a botanical hipster from New
York City, and David, a decorated gardener in New York
City, all he goes to the botanical gardens to get away
from our busy life and Brookland.
Holly simply meanders around enjoys the scenery takes in all
the greenery around her. But Holly is an botanical hipster
who likes particular kinds of plants, not just the garden
variety roses or sunflower daffodils. She likes specific
species that are uncommon, and of course she finds one tucked
away behind a bunch of pots. And upon seeing this, she gets a
small vibration in her pocket and is alerted that there's a
gift waiting for her from Edinburgh. Meanwhile, David, the
decorated gardener in Edinburgh, is busy feeding his roses that
are particular in colour and nature. Back in New York, Holly
receives a particular gift a seed from David's garden, and
she accepts it. Once Holly accepts that seed David and
Holly are able to communicate, share their love for particular
botanicals and share interests and how to care for plants. In
return. Holly sends seeds back to David and particular plants
that David can't grow in Edinburgh. Holly puts her mobile
device back in her pocket and enjoys the rest of her day and
she meanders through the Botanical Gardens in New York
City. And along her way, she's able to pick up other roses and
other flowers and other unique species that are shared to her
by other people around the world as she make my community of
garden enthusiasts but Holly needs to return to her apartment
in Brooklyn and meanders back home to her busy life. Upon
entering her apartment, Holly receives a notification, a
notification that her seed from David has grown and aligning her
mobile device with any cylindrical object in our
apartment, she's able to see the augmented reality layer of her
digital rose, growing from within her coffee cup.
And of course, since she spent her day throughout the garden,
she has picked up other flowers and other seeds from other
people around the world. And she's able to see a bouquet of
flowers and other plants that have been given to her during
the day.
So what are blended experiences and why are they important?
In 1994, Milgram and Kishu looked at the mixed reality
spectrum, to look at how things in the real environment
transition into the virtual environment, looking at
everything from tangible user interfaces, to immersive VR and
everything in between. And what this research has done is
created a foundation to how we explore blends and what blended
spaces are. What is basically an extension of mixed reality, but
at the level of physical place rather than product. It's not
about the mobile phone or device. It's about the physical
environment and the experience that you have with it. Blended
spaces are places where physical space and digital spaces have
been carefully co designed.
However, blended spaces are more than just reactive mixed
realities. Blended spaces have their own coherence their own
properties.
For starters, blended theory is a theory where knowledge of
creation comes from the linguistics research. It shows
how similarities but also recognises differences between
how certain domains and how we understand new experiences.
Give you an example frenemy you might not know what frenemy
means maybe you do what two fundamental ideas coming
together a friend and an enemy. But in this case, a quite great
example is Magneto Magneto and Professor Xavier
Here are two quintessential enemies trying to take over the
world in different ways. But of course, at the end of the day,
they love playing chess.
But its basis also looks at presence theory and presence in
designing blending experiences. Plans presence is a sense of
being in a place or being there Prince's presence is often
defined as the illusion of non mediation. In 2005, Steve
benford used his trajectories framework to create uncle Roy
around you, which looks at blast theory to explain seamless user
experiences through the use of discovery, and storytelling.
Meanwhile, the blend is basis framework
that David and I put together looked at how cheap
schoolchildren can transition in and out of physical places
through augmented reality platforms. However,
understanding how to transition between physical and physical,
digital and physical spaces isn't so easy, and it wasn't
clear in original work, how those two things came together.
So we've created in this paper is the blended experiences
framework, which merges David banyans Designing Spaces
framework with bedfords trajectory framework to create
new experiences and how we move between digital physical spaces.
And then of course, back again.
In this case, we look at how benford trajectory model fits
within the transition between physical spaces and digital
spaces. And the cell on the right, you'll see that the
transitions and trajectories start at the beginning. And in
this story of plant pals, the beginning happens in the
vibration of the pod. In the pocket. Holly receives
notification in a subtle way, of course, not distracting from our
environment, but to let her know that there's a gift from another
land far away that's given to her. And this begins the
transition between the physical space going into the digital
space.
But of course, we need to come back out of the digital space
and back into the physical space. So the cell on the right
looks at how, after the interactions, the of using the
app and collecting seeds that Holly places her phone back into
her pocket. And although this might seem like a physical space
gesture, the mobile phone and the software behind it is
gathering information about her her physical location, while the
digital space looks to align physical things in a real world
such as a sunflower, and to use them as physical resources. So
they anchors that interactions into into the physical space
then, of course, reaching out to the digital world. And in this
case, Ed Hutchins used this model of material anchors in
this in this context.
Through these interactions, blended spaces have
been merged. And these versions comes in two episodes, and it
seems, and these episodes and seems create these moments of
blends. When Holly is not really interested in the mobile phone
at all. She's interested in just meandering through the
environment and meandering through the space that she she's
enjoying. Meanwhile, the mobile services and the interactions
happen in the background. So she has a new sense of place a new
sense of being there. And of course, feeling connected to
people that frankly are living far in gardening far away.
In summary,
the emerging benefits trajectories into Benny's spaces
framework guided us in the creation of a third tool,
designing experiences. With all these transitions and
trajectories, they add more depth to your design process of
strategy. A blended experience is not an all encompassing
experience, but rather a series of individual moments. On the
bottom right, you can see that there's two cells that really
highlight how these two digital and physical spaces to come
together to create a new sense of place. Whereas the other
cells that are shadowed are other transitions, they may not
be blended spaces, but they're either physical or digital or
the transitioning between the two.
And in summary, digital things can produce physical
experiences, and think so naturally, but also physical
places can produce digital experiences. And and that's key
when when we came away with this was
just because it's a mobile device and you're using a mobile
device doesn't mean it's a digital thing and vice versa.
Just because you're in the physical space doesn't mean that
that physical interaction is
Justin physical interaction. There are segues between the
digital and physical spaces here.
So designing blended experiences guides us in the design of
seamless user experiences that bring digital and physical
spaces together and how we transition between them.
Thank you. This presentation is dedicated to our colleague,
friend and mentor, David benyon.