Human Senses

Challenges encountered

Since the beginning of the project, we have had struggles to find the right angle, the right aspect to focus on. Human senses itself was clearly too broad, and using technologies triggering all of them at the same time turned out to be an over-kill. Defining a clear problem was also challenging: storytelling nowadays works - it is not really a problem that some senses are currently not included. We changed our target group from news journalism to advertisers because we thought that including senses would work best within a marketing perspective.

Change in our project

The feedback that we got after our mid-term presentation last Friday clearly showed us two things:

- our concept was not strong and clear enough.

- the possibilities of using smell in storytelling seemed especially appealing to the audience, since it is closely linked to memories.

Seeing how much interest the use of smell technologies caused, we all agreed to lay focus on this. In a ‚eureka‘-moment, we had an idea for a new concept…

What we have done

…that we then discussed further, added upon and finally agreed on a solution in form of a publishing app. Hereby we want to take into consideration both user sides: the one of the publisher and the one of the consumer. Here’s the summary of it:

Information overload has lead to a fight over attention, why the creation of an emotional bond with a story is easily lost. Our publishing app helps communicators tell their stories in a more engaging format, building on modern technologies that trigger different senses: It lets users enter text, sound, 3D pictures and smell (based on the oNotes technology).

It optimizes the story depending on the device that people consume it with. For example, when consumed on a smartwatch, the text could be read to the consumers, sounds and smells will be added, but pictures will be let out; When watched on a projector, more focus will lie on pictures, sound and smell; Etc.

What we will do

Our next steps are

• Getting some more feedback on this idea, since we changed it after the feedback from the mid-term crit
• Do personas of two or three potential users to develop a clearer picture of how this app would work and be used
• Start gathering ideas for the final presentation. As Matilda and Anna had mentioned the book ‚Regnet lukar inte här‘ we are considering this but need to put more thought into it.