Echoscapes
Reimagining our relationship with technology while harnessing the positive aspects for social wellness
Brief
Client
HCDE Master's Capstone
(Master's Thesis)
6 months Jan 2023 - Jun 2023
Team: Priyana Patel, Kara Bates, Vanessa Chien Lai, Annie Lin
Experts have long debated technology's societal impact, extensively researching its deleterious effects (Kuss & Lopez-Fernandez, 2016). The rapid and forced adaptation triggered by COVID-19 has significantly increased our reliance on technology, transforming its integration into our lives and further blurring the line between online and offline. In a post-pandemic world, the rise of remote work has made social connections heavily dependent on digital environments, often fostering negative relationships with technology and leaving people feeling more isolated. Consequently, our close-knit connections with friends and family are profoundly impacted by these digital environments.
Design Question
Sony sponsored our team to answer this question. The Home Entertainment UX team at Sony Electronics in San Diego, California wanted to reimagine how their suite of home entertainment products (speakers, TVs, and headphones) could empower older Generation Z and young Millennial customers (birth years 1988-1998) in their wellness journeys, leveraging their high technological literacy and purchasing power.
User Research
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In our survey, we asked participants to rank the five wellness dimensions by importance from 1 (Not important at all) to 5 (Very important) and prompted them to explain their reasoning. A total of 58 individuals responded to our survey from a wide range of incomes and ages. The survey gave us a sense of which wellness dimensions our target demographic views as most important and influenced our subsequent research methods.
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Following the survey, we conducted a 7-day diary study with 8 participants between the ages of 25-35 with a self-reported annual income between $75,000 and $150,000. Throughout the week, participants logged the technologies they used throughout the day and how they impacted their wellness. Participants could submit a maximum of three daily photos that related to their wellness.
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We held Interactive Groups to bring together participants with varying wellness goals to reflect, share, discuss, and brainstorm ideas relevant to their health and wellness. We conducted three 1-hour sessions with 4 participants each, for a total of 12 participants. Each session involved a warm-up activity, a timeline drawing exercise, a wellness card game, and a concluding debrief. During the card game (the main session activity), participants drew and traded technology and action cards to build a wellness toolkit to help them accomplish their 2023 wellness goals.
Wellness dimensions are inextricably linked
Our research confirms that wellness is a holistic pursuit, with the five wellness dimensions, physical, mental, social, intellectual, and financial working in harmony. Participants valued certain wellness dimensions not by their traditional definitions, but on their potential to affect other areas of their wellness.
Effects of technology depend on many factors
From our Diary Study, we found that technology, for better or worse, plays an integral part in participants’ lives. However, rather than technology being inherently “good” or “bad,” participants often cited the effects of technology being dependent on other factors—lifestyle, mood, situation, and more. Positive interactions with technology were more passive and negative interactions were more intrusive.
People value social connection
The notion that COVID-19 increased social isolation is not new. Our participants often linked social connection with improved mental or physical health. Participants frequently mentioned feeling isolated and cooped up inside with remote work, and enjoyed going outside or connecting with others like their family and friends to counter those negative feelings.
Design Principles
Ideation
The Concept
An immersive home entertainment experience that aims to enhance mental, emotional, and social wellness. Home entertainment technology will transport users into a different place at home.
Co-Design
We conducted a collaborative activity to narrow our scope and include our target demographic directly in the design process. Our goals were to learn about unique households and how Sony's home entertainment technology could be incorporated into real living environments. We wanted to understand how users would interact with our solution and identify potential challenges and design considerations. We conducted a 1 hour session with 6 partipants.
Red Robin
Utilising the Round Robin brainstorming strategy, we asked participants to consider the features they would want to include in their “immersive (home) experience.” Each participant was given one minute to describe a feature. Once time was up, they passed their paper to the next person. They were then asked to “iterate” on the feature given to them by another participant, providing further details and descriptions. After this cycle was completed twice, participants read from their worksheets and discussed the possibilities of their proposed technology features.
Building an Immersive Experience
Participants then had the opportunity to build an immersive experience in their homes. They redrew the rough sketches of their home floor plans on the whiteboard tables in the room. We then handed out “chips" which represented different home entertainment technologies (TVs, speakers, soundbars, smart lights). Participants had five minutes to place the chips throughout their floor plans based on how they would like to use the immersive experience in their everyday lives. We also provided blank chips for our participants to annotate speculative ideas such as a “digital wardrobe.”
Findings
Our session uncovered a concept that integrates existing lights, visuals, speakers, and other IoT devices to create an immersive in-home experience. Participants stressed the need for a solution that caters to their diverse lifestyles and living spaces. Key features that were mentioned included: connection with others, soundscapes, adjusting ambient noise based on time, and live locations.
The Solution
Sound
The system would use Augmented Reality and 360 Reality to mimic real-life locations in the user's home. This transports users to a different place utilizing their existing home entertainment system.
Social Connection
Send and receive soundscapes based on real-time conditions at a specific location. This allows users to share experiences with their loved ones, creating a sense of connection in a non-intrusive way.
Device Interconnectedness
Our experience aims to connect non-Sony devices like lighting to increase immersion beyond audio and visuals. If a soundscape plays ocean waves and the TV shows a matching scene, the lighting would shift to reflect the hues of dawn, dusk, or daytime.
Reflection
Be decisive
Unlike previous projects, our capstone was largely self-directed, requiring us to make key decisions about research methods, concept selection, and design. We spent significant time validating our design concept with users before narrowing down core features. While we may have prolonged the early phases, we ultimately learned to be more decisive throughout the two-quarter process.
The sky's the limit
As our final academic project, the capstone taught us not to limit our creativity. Early on, we got lost in the details, but we learned to focus on refining the core idea first. Knowing we might not get this kind of creative freedom in industry, we took full advantage of the opportunity to build something of our own.
Limitations
Although our primary research methods provided a plethora of rich qualitative data, there were some limitations:
Future Considerations
For future work, there are multiple opportunities to explore:
Links