After conducting research on the problems that bee face last semester, we sought to address the lack of education that there is on bees and the problems they face.
Our initial concept was for an Augmented Reality (AR) experience to help inform people about bees. We thought that AR would be a great way for people to build empathy with bees, as someone could look through the eyes of a bee. We brainstormed and researched different application of AR.
We went to Milwaukee to explore different interactive experiences, such as Deep Lake Future and the Milwaukee Public Museum. We wanted to gain insights into how different interactive experiences immerse their users and convey their message.
A sample layout for an interactive experience where the user explores a world in 2240 which has only one bee remaining.
After visiting museums, we turned our focus away from AR and decided to try and incorporate more physical elements. We found that museums would often use multiple senses to get someone immersed in their story. We also worked on developing the story of our interactive experience, deciding to focus it on a possible future without bees.
We went to Milwaukee to explore museums and get feedback from artists and designers on our concept. We wanted to see how feasible our idea would be. An important insight that we got that helped guide our project was the thought that we could have separate exhibits, and that separate ideas can still be connected. We struggled previously with trying to make all of the exhibit cohesive and connected.
Following feedback, we combined our idea for a choose your own adventure game with our idea for an interactive exhibit. We decided to make it a digital experience instead of physical since we were all familiar with digital prototyping and decided that a physical model would take too long to implement. I created wireframes to help illustrate the layout of our design.
I had the idea to add a tracker for money, environmentalism, and happiness as a way to make our experience more game like.
Our final prototype has users go through a choose your own adventure game, where the results lead to either a utopia with bees or a utopia without bees. We wanted to have the user bee able to experience both the present and explore the future.
The choices for the characters were based off of different problems bees face, such as crop choice or urbanization, and the different artifacts that players can explore were also based on problems bees face as well as our own ideas for how the future could look.
