After our last project, we knew we wanted to take our theme of boredom and dig deeper. Following our presentation from the previous assignment and some early discussions, we came to the conclusion that we liked the idea of focusing on engagement and attention spans in the modern world. It felt like a natural continuation and evolution of our theme of boredom – it should speak more deeply about why we avoid boredom and why we feel like we lack of meaning with nothing to do, both of which were questions we raised at the end of the last project. We’d also like to focus on interactivity with the audience this time around as an important characteristic, as well as some form of user choice/user generated content.

We’ve now spent a couple of classes working out exactly what we want to do for this final project. I think we struggled to find our footing at the beginning; there was a lack of cohesiveness in our ideas and we struggled explaining them to each other. We had something of a general consensus – some sort of interactive experience that would say something about the user and their engagement with our content. Liam had the idea of a social media feed that the user could scroll through, upvoting or downvoting content based on how engaging it was to them. I had the idea of a series of videos with some kind of skip button, allowing the user to pass on videos they felt were boring. However, neither of the concepts felt fleshed out enough to proceed with.

Feedback from other students was interesting. They had suggestions for us, such as timing the user and a quiz, but it never all came together. Hannah proposed the idea of a quiz at the end of something simple such as a Tumblr blog, which would allow us to measure the user’s engagement in an easy and achievable way. We think that could be a great direction to go in, so we’ve set out a timeline and chosen Wix as our platform. Over the next week we’re going to work out the details and what kind of content we want to shoot, and move on to the website and quiz from there.