Baby’s First Experience Design Project

Up until December 2018, I had never even heard of Experience Design as a field. Since I’ve stepped into it, I’ve realized that it is a perfect synthesis of my skill sets: envisioning and executing the bigger picture, and making slide decks. A LOT of slide decks.

This semester I got the chance to be the Lead Experience Designer for a collaboration with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Our team designed an interactive experience for children to practice kindness. The final prototype was a mixed reality experience in which children control a physical umbrella prop, mapped to a digital umbrella in a virtual world. Children work together or independently to shelter characters from the rain and bring them back to their homes.

This project gave me the opportunity to flex my design skills. But this wouldn’t have been possible without an amazing team to provide me with the bandwidth to try something new. I was incredibly lucky to have amazing artists that created characters that invoked empathy, a programmer who provided valuable design feedback, and a fearless producer who was able to emotionally and physically guide us through our first project course at the ETC. Their trust in me helped me to become a more confident designer, and I can’t thank them enough.

I learned so much from this experience:

• Kids are way smarter than you think

• The difference between designing for an experience vs. a game

• Telling stories and building interest curves without definite entry and exit points

• Balancing diverse client needs with faculty needs

• Converting a human emotional experience into a digital experience

• How to make a killer slide deck

You can find all the gruesome details on our blog.

Being the Dumbest Person In the Room, Means You’re In the Right Room

During admissions, I was told that the ETC recruits 40% artists, 40% programmers, and 20% of random people that are the “binding glue.” I was to fall into the 20%, which meant 1) that it would be harder for me to get in and 2) that when I got in, I would be behind in skill sets.

When I got in, I found the latter to be definitely true.

I was assigned as an Artist in Building Virtual Worlds (BVW). BVW is a semester-long course where you work in two week design sprints with alternating teams of five students (two programmers, two artists, and one sound designers) to build original virtual worlds that fulfill different objectives. As an artist, my role was to provide art for the worlds, which meant that I had to learn to 3D model, texture, rig, and animate in one week.

I cried during my first week. I was sick. This was hard. After having been out of school for three years, it was difficult to make an adjustment back to school mentality.

I spent the entire Labor Day weekend trying to complete my first assignment: 3D modeling a dragon. Which is just about as hard as it sounds if you’ve never done it before. I spent four hours just trying to open a file in Photoshop.

While I struggled to complete this assignment, many other artists around me were done in a few hours. Some artists even made two dragons! I had strong doubts that I didn’t belong in the program.

But at the end of the weekend, with a LOT of help from my peers, I did it.

Since that weekend, I’ve become a much better artist. I modeled an entire purgatory underworld, Evel Knievel rubber ducks, and an office scene with at least 30 inanimate objects. Granted at first, my models weren’t so great (my 3D clouds looked like literal poop), I learned a ton, and I learned it really fast. I’m really surprised about how far I’ve come, and I have to thank my peers for that.

While being the dumbest person in the room can be scary and intimidating, it helps when you’re surrounded by people who are willing to teach you. One of the most valuable resources that we have at the ETC is actually our peers. While I’ve learned high concepts from my professors, my peers have been the ones to explain to me how to correctly UV map, paint skin weights, and keyframe animations.

As a lifelong learner, the scariest thing for me isn’t being the dumbest person in the room, it’s being in a place where I have no one to learn from.

TL;DR Not knowing what you’re doing is ok.

Grad School Is Weird, Man

If I could describe the ETC program in one word it would be: WEIRD. And HARD.

On our first day of class, we built towers out of spaghetti. Last week, we learned how to juggle. This week, I debuted as Angela from American Beauty and learned to seduce men in improv.

Our team wrecking the competition at a spaghetti + marshmallow building contest.

I knew my program was going to be nontraditional, but I didn’t think it would be this weird.

And the weirdest thing is that the weirdness is what makes this hard. With traditional assignments, there’s usually only one right answer. But with the assignments that we receive, there’s an infinite number of possibilities. And we’re tasked with thinking of the infinite outside of the infinite, to go beyond what’s already been done. Which means that a lot of what we end up making ends up being…well, weird.

What I’ve learned from this daily exercise of thinking outside of the box is that:

1. Creativity is a muscle.

   Being creative is not an easy task. It takes practice. I used to think that some people were just more creative than others. In reality, being creative is a muscle that you have to exercise everyday to get better and stronger. And trust me, the ETC is giving me a really good workout.

2. Creativity comes when you say yes.

   It’s really easy to poke holes in other people’s ideas. It’s really hard to help fix them. Saying yes to other people’s ideas even when you see the flaws, can actually be surprisingly productive.

3. Creative potential is unlimited.

   I sometimes feel like I’ve hit a wall, like I have no more good ideas left. It’s about ten ideas past that point, that I start to actually come up with the best ideas.

Although this program is a little bit painful, and a lot a bit weird, I am so excited for what I’ll come up with in the next two years. I hope it’s weirder than my wildest imaginations.

TL;DR Weird builds creativity.

How’d I Get Here?

During the first week of school the question to ask was: “Are you an artist, programmer, or sound designer?” To which I would answer, “None of the above.”

My background is in science education. I studied biology and psychology in college, and I loved science. But I liked talking about science, more than I liked actually doing it. I interned at STEM outreach programs, mentored students in low-income areas, and even designed my own after school STEAM program for my senior thesis. As a result, I ended up working at NOVA, the public science television program, as a production assistant for the education team.

At NOVA, I realized the power of media to educate, and saw the growing potential for games and interactive experiences to reach a more diverse audience. However, I didn’t have the skill sets necessary to build those experiences.

I discovered the ETC through coincidence. I was looking into the career paths’ of employees at companies that I admired, trying to figure how I could get there. I found Michelle Cohen, the Director of Creative Programming at the Two Bit Circus (at the time). She studied at the Entertainment Technology Center, and when I looked into it, I realized that I had actually read about the program years ago.

For my high school graduation, my dad had given me Randy Pausch’s book, “The Last Lecture,” as a guiding philosophy to starting my adult life. I had read that book with fervor, and if anyone asked, it was my favorite book. It also happened to be the ten year anniversary of “The Last Lecture,” when I rediscovered the program. It was too much of a coincidence.

Although it seemed like the right fit and there were many guiding signs, I worried that I wasn’t qualified enough. But I visited the ETC anyway, and when I walked through the doors, I knew this is where I had to be. On the admissions floor, I was greeted by a twenty foot long, floor-to-ceiling installation of an intergalactic space ship control center. I was hooked.

Now, here I am in the ETC Class of 2020. I feel blessed to be able to walk by the space ship control center every morning. And I’m neither an artist, programmer, or sound designer. But, I’m here to learn.

Me standing in front of the control center on the 5th floor of the ETC excitedly pointing to my name.

TL;DR I’m here to build cool things for science.