MISSION RINGS

International Project | Royal College of Art & Imperial College London

September - November 2020

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Mission Rings is a mobile game that sparks and facilitates serendipitous interactions in a digital space.

Inspired by the study- / work-from-home situation and the issue of digital fatigue, Mission Rings ultimately aims to break the monotony and reimage online interactions, through sparking serendipitous interactions between you and your friends through playful missions.

KEYWORDS: Digital Communication, Digital Fatigue, Social Relations, Serendipity

SKILLS: UI/ UX (Adobe XD), Video Production (Adobe Premiere Pro & After Effects), Secondary Research, Experiments, User Research

Initial Discovery

Combining my interests in digital communication and social relations with the context of work/ study from home and the uses of Zoom/ Skype/ Microsoft Teams, I discovered opportunities where I design within.

How may we facilitate serendipitous moments in the digital environment to combat digital fatigue?

Research & Gathering Insights

Event boundaries help us code memories and remember things better. With the existing digital communication tools and social networking services, the transitions between interactions can become all the same to us without such boundaries.

I asked participants who are either studying or working from home in Hong Kong on how they separate work from private life at home. Storyboards were created based on those insights to retrace their daily events, e.g. the rituals they have at the office and how they recreate them at home.

Defining Direction

One thing that stood out to me in my research is the loss of serendipitous/ organic interactions or surprises (e.g. water-cooler chats) when people interact online.

This has led to my direction of designing an intervention that aims to create the “unexpected” in digital communication, leading to “spontaneous” interactions and moments, ultimately breaking down monotony during the process.

Experimenting & Facilitating Serendipity

Taking the “unexpected” direction forward as an inspiration for my experiment of creating a randomised interaction within a constructed environment.

3 participants in Hong Kong gave me a time frame after work and we would have random Zoom or FaceTime calls throughout the week for about 5-10 minutes, feedbacks were given by the participants after each interaction.

Mission Rings: Bringing People Closer Together

After iterations of the experiments, Mission Rings was born. It is a mobile game where people complete missions together that aim to spark serendipitous digital interactions.

The string phone as part of the Mission Rings icon represents the idea of mutual efforts from all participating parties to complete missions together.

Mission Rings: User Flow

Missions will appear randomly throughout the day and users will get a notification, they can choose to either ignore or accept it.

Once two or more people from the user’s friend group or contact list depending on what information the user is willing to share, accept the mission, they will be brought to a mission room, which can be an audio or video call to complete the mission together.