Weekly Questions

1. Who are you designing for?
The overall label of the intended audience we want to design for is ‘Gamers’. Through the research conducted previously, it came to our attention that the label gamers comes with a multitude of user-profiles, thus rather than designing from a general overview, we would like to focus on one user-profile in particular, of the pre-selected target audience, ‘Casual/ Explorative Gamers’.

Based on the previously conducted research we learned the following:

who’s the user; ​​ a “casual gamer” is someone who enjoys any video game without investing significant time into it, playing it spontaneously, irregularly, or infrequently.

Profile user’s qualities that are either exclusive to them or in common with us, ‘the makers’.

Qualities in common
(Enjoy consuming digital media, short attention span, explorative, picky…).

Exclusive qualities to them
(Enjoy games at their own pace, life does not revolve around games, mostly mobile/web-based games…).

Due to the user’s qualities listed above, we thought it would have been worthwhile and challenging to pick such a user profile since its point of interest, possible dislikes/likes, and expectations are much more different and unpredictable from the other user profiles within the label(Hard-core gamer, Newbies, Pro gamers, retro gamers and so on…).


2. What is their relationship to the collection?
Although there’s no specific direct relationship between the chosen profile and the collection, we would hope, to create one ourselves. Europeana, is an archive of stories and collections of European heritage. Thus we thought (additionally through assumptions made with our research), it could be quite interesting for them to learn cultural European content since a lot of video games(for instance the Assassin’s Creed saga, WWII games…) are often based and influenced by European history which is perceived as one of the richest and most influential segments within human kind’s history.

3. Which content are you ‘interfacing’?
(https://www.europeana.eu/en/exhibitions/the-silk-and-the-blood/constantinople)
(https://www.europeana.eu/en/exhibitions/the-art-of-reading-in-the-middle-ages)
(https://www.europeana.eu/en/exhibitions/the-danube-connecting-europe)
(https://www.europeana.eu/en/exhibitions/magical-mystical-and-medicinal)
(https://www.europeana.eu/en/exhibitions/revolution-and-war/resistance-and-conformity)

As we’ve looked through the collection and the content that it displayed, the exhibitions links shown above, are what we believe the most interesting and worthwhile content that the website has to offer to our intended target audience. The reason behind such content choices is due to the fact that by displaying short and different exhibitions of segments of Europe’s history we can entertain casual gamers by avoiding being repetitive (content-wise) and lowering spreading the risk of disinterest of the user since we create a false sense of freedom by letting them choose out of these exhibitions which ones they want to delve into (out of the listed).

4. How does the ‘interface’ affect or influence the ‘user’?
Looking back to our notes and content learned through this term, by default we can state, to begin with, Europeana’s website is an interface itself. Although the interface’s purpose is to facilitate the display of content (in this case a collection of exhibitions of European history) we believe that it can be executed in a much more submersive and eye-catching way than it currently is.To achieve such, we want to encourage the intended user to connect to a ‘different reality’ and be manipulated to access the data displayed in a much more fun and interactive way compared to the previously mentioned interface.

5. What type of interaction is fitting for this?
Based on the chosen user profile research, we came to our realization that the most fitting type of interaction for displaying such content is through ‘spatial motion’ and ‘observing’ interactions. By spatial-motion interaction, we intend that the user in order to access the content he/she will have to move physically through the help of the interface. We believe these are the most suited interactions to take place via the interface since our intended audience has a short attention span and likes to delve and experience content at its own pace.

6. What type of medium is fitting for this?
Formed on previous statements and points made through the design questions, we believe that the most appropriate medium to display the chosen collections is via ‘virtual reality’ also known as ‘VR’ more commonly. More conceptually, via the use of computer modeling and simulation, we want to enable our user to interact with an artificial three-dimensional (3-D) visual-sensory stimulated environment where the chosen exhibitions we’ll be displayed.

7. Which visual language (including typography) can be useful or fitting for this?
Preferably, by keeping in mind our user profile and content, it will be essential to display our collections with aesthetics and color palettes suited to each one of them. Although not fully specified and finalized yet, the general properties and parameters of the visual language used will be the following; Elegant, minimalistic, clean, at times asymmetrical, rational, synthetic, and overall the elements displayed within the interface will be decently scaled so that the user can be fully immersed with the content that is experiencing/observing. We believe these parameters are the best since a casual gamer wants to experience its content at its own pace. Additionally, a casual gamer most of the time plays or indulges in games due to their graphics, thus displaying our content in aesthetically pleasing formats is mandatory!
8. What are you trying to accomplish through the interface you want to design?
Our team, with the interface that we want to design, Ideally we’d like to offer and reformulate a better execution of Europeana through a different lens and intended target audience so that we can educate our users and make them more culturally aware of the world that we live in since Europe’s historical events and doings majorly impacted and structured the course of our contemporary planet.