Kaleidoscope

What is Kaleidoscope?

Crayola Experience at the Florida Mall is full of attractions that kids and adults can enjoy. Kaleidoscope is one of my favorite attractions because it gives people the ability to be part of the artwork, and I also enjoyed how it’s designed. The fascinating design invites kids to engage with it. The environment was designed to fit the purpose of the activity; Kaleidoscope has enough room to contain a large crowd of people. The screen is massive, yet it has an excellent resolution.

Moreover, this attraction has a video clip artwork that was built using Kaleidoscope technique; pieces of colored papers and images, whose reflections produce changing patterns. A person can be part of the artwork by standing on the footprint, and after that, his/her image will be transferred into the video. Kaleidoscope also has a significant feature that activates upon a request. A person can type his/her email in an iPad that hangs beside the screen to record the event and send it to their personal email.

How People Interact with Kaleidoscope?

People were easily interacting with the attraction since it was designed carefully. While observing people engaging with Kaleidoscope, I didn’t see any difficulties that faced the users. People were enjoying the attraction with their families; dancing and acting weird together. However, some people were ignoring the “Email Your Video” feature; they didn’t try using the iPad to type their email. I honestly cannot tell if they were not aware of the feature at all, even though the arrow sign is very apparent, or they were feeling insecure about sharing their emails. The rest of the people were excitedly trying to check their phones to see if the video arrived. Kaleidoscope attraction is full of actions, yet it won’t take much time to complete its steps. It will take less than one minute starting from typing the user’s email to receiving the video.

The Principles of Interaction Design

According to Don Norman, there are five to six principles for a well-designed device. The following principles, affordance, signifiers, mapping, feedback, and conceptual model have a significant role in Kaleidoscope communication.

Being engaged with the artwork and sending the video via email are the affordances of the Kaleidoscope. The signifiers come into three different ways, the big arrow on top of the iPad that says “Email Your Video” to emphasize its location, the three different sizes of footprints marked on the floor to clarify the position of where people should stand, and the two phrases that appear on the screen alternately “Stand on the Marked Spot” or “Email Yourself a Video.”  Specifying what each part of the attraction does, helped mapping Kaleidoscope to be understandable.

The attraction shows the people that the system is working by affording feedback, the fourth principle. For example, after the user types his/her email, the system starts the countdown numbers saying that your request is under process.

Although the attraction has multiple parts, it works as a whole in a harmonious system without any obstacles to accomplishing the fifth principle, which is the conceptual model.

To sum up, Kaleidoscope was well structured and fabulously designed in all of its aspects, environment, artwork, and utilization!

Reference

Norman, Don. The Design of Everyday Things : Revised and Expanded Edition, Basic Books, 2013, pp. 1-36.