Research Document – Version 1

 

PROJECT NAME:

Claudia Thomas                                Stress and Colour                              Ver 1

ABSTRACT:

Looking over all my research there were 3 clear themes at play; colour, emotions and the brain. Researching into these areas many fascinating topics came up including colour and emotions in 3D space, colour systems, navigation through space with colour, using brainwaves as a controller to effect outcomes of the game, recording the users emotions in different ways (brainwaves, facial expressions, heart rate) and using these to affect game-play.

However I needed to reduce these areas down to just one, main area to focus on. Reflecting upon all my work I was most excited by the ability to record emotions using brain waves and using those waves to affect the mechanics or behaviour of characters within the game.

Though it took some time to realise, I soon came to the realisation that is technology was far too underdeveloped and I would greatly struggle trying to create something so ground-breaking.Therefore I decided to remove this idea for it being too ambition and not reasonable possible.

Leaving colours and emotions left, I wanted to connect these somehow, though I didn’t currently have a purpose or target audience for my project, making it very difficult to define a research area and progress the project.

Using mind maps I expanded out my ideas of who and how a game could help, to assist me in identifying a purpose and audience for my project. From the selection I specifically liked the purpose of teaching people to change negative emotions to positive ones and the idea of teaching people how stress affects them and how to deal with it. I felt negative emotions to positives ones as a topic was too vague and fell under the category of dealing with stress anyways, therefore stress became my main topic.

Having stress as my research topic, I talked over the project and what I wanted to achieve, coming to the conclusion of combining both stress and colour and showing how stress affects the body through colour.

Using colour I feel I could personify the affects of stress, so not necessarily making the user feel stress, but I could cause someone to see a character in a stressful environment, so they can reflect upon how the character is being affected, rather than feeling it themselves. As I thought that people don’t learn or concentrate when they are stressed and so they wouldn’t learn how stress is affecting them, when they are feeling that way.

I believe I could incorporate my research of 3D colour systems ( gradients, wheels, Gamut, and Munsell colour systems) into the idea of the game, whether that be determining the shape of the environment or the mechanics of changing the hue, value and saturation of colour.

 

GOALS:

 

  • Put the player through an emotional journey
  • Make the user reflect upon how stress affects people – Awareness
  • Visually beautiful
  • Meaningful Game

 

USER EXPERIENCE:

AUDIENCE:

 

  • Gamers (casual)
  • Still need to figure out.

 

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS:
  • Journey
  • Beyond Eyes

 

How will it differ?

  • Tackling a different subject matter.
  • Try to make them aware of the issue of stress on people including themselves and with that awareness maybe a change of behaviour. Though I want to make it more than an experience and have a greater purpose and meaning to it, with real applications eg causing the user to reflect upon stress and how it affects us.

 

CRITICAL ANALYSIS:

 

Currently my whole project revolves around non game research including:

 

How the brain is effected by emotions.

  • Brainwaves Analysis of Positive and Negative emotions – Fu- Chien, Shinping R. Wang, Yu-Jung Chang
  • Emotion – Annett Schirmer
  • The Brain and Emotion – Edmund T.Rolls

 

How we can record and use emotions

  • Measuring Emotions – Pieter M.A Desmet

 

Connection between colour and emotion

 

Colour Systems – 3D models, colour wheels, gradients

screen-shot-2016-11-03-at-16-50-47

 

 

Chromosethesia – Visualising sound as colour

 

Sound Therapy

 

Visualising mental illness within shapes

 

PROJECT CONTENT:

 

COMPONENTS:

 

Unity game on screen – Because I feel with the use of colour having such great importance within my research, I think I will need to use a screen to gain the correct colours and larger range of colours than can be printed.

 

FUNCTIONAL SPECiFICS:

 

  • To be confirmed once I start ideating.

 

 

PROJECT STRUCTURE:

 

METHODOLOGIES:
  • Agile
  • KanBan
  • Lean UX
  • Andy’s random ideation Method

 

 

PLAN:

I plan to do a short sharp research phase into stress as I have only just got to the conclusion that this is the main area I am focusing on. Therefore I believe I need to learn more about stress before I can start ideating and combining it with colour, so the designs I produce will be helpful and contain accurate information.

Then I will start bringing all my research together to form a broad range of ideas, expanding my thoughts out and then narrowing them down to a couple of ideas before experimenting with prototyping and testing.

 

NEXT PHASE
  • I plan to initially research more into stress; specifically who stress affects most, in order to define my audience. Then produce a persona for my audience, to help me when designing a game.
  • I also plan to look into how stress affects people, gaining examples, anecdotes and artist representations; helping me to better understand stress and how I could represent its affect in game.
  • Bringing all the research together along with the colour research I have down, I plan to combine the ideas together using the methods we did last year, of random design and randomly selecting mechanics and themes to visually combine. Enabling me to think outside of the box and innovatively.
  • Gaining a large range of ideas I plan to then narrow them down to a couple of ideas which best fit the brief, are innovative and have a chance of being possible. Then I will form simple prototypes to test.

 

How will I test?

I think at the initial stage I will simple test on people around, to gain an idea of how the mechanics work and how to improve them. Then once I have defined my target audience, I will try to get into contact with them and test out some of my more finalised prototypes with them to alter the design to suit their preferences and abilities.

SCHEDULE:

 

Week 1

  • Research Stress – How, Why, Who – Preventing stress – Reducing stress – Artists interpretations of stress
  • Define Audience
  • Initial Ideating

 

Week 2

  • More ideations
  • Narrow down to a couple of ideas
  • Continue researching where appropriate

 

Week 3

  • Prototyping Ideas
  • Test Prototypes
  • Refining and adapting ideas depending on the outcomes of the tests
  • Have 3 ideas ready to present
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