UX of Yellow - Week 5

👥 : Ramya Sekar, Greta (Guo) Chen, Dora Alvarez, Willow Yan

🗓 : October 28 - November 4, 2021

With the feedback from Thursday’s presentation and tutorials, the team moved toward adding the colour yellow to lifeless materials and environments. John suggested looking at Sandy Skoglund’s Surrealist work, essentially turning non-yellow objects to yellow, making them unfamiliar to the eyes. After some more discussion, the team ventured outdoors to observe Elephant and Castle and discover ways to add life to an area. This idea sprang from Outside Lies Magic, detailing the ways we find inspiration through the outdoors.

To begin the concept, we sought to redesign a dull and flat area using yellow objects to add vitality. The team settled on a children’s playground and park. At first glance, the area looked minimalistic, plain, and uninviting.

We had the opportunity to chat with Alaistair for feedback. We wanted to use various materials, such as balloons, yellow tissue paper, post-its and previous toolkits. We liked the idea of playing with different textures, shapes and shades. He believed it would be more meaningful to abandon man-made objects and use naturally-occurring objects as the tools for the redesign.

From there, we explored the streets of London looking for naturally-occurring yellow materials. Due to the season, we saw plenty of yellow leaves, which we added to our toolkit. It was challenging to pick the leaves every day to avoid them losing their yellow colour. We also repurposed items from the week before and obtained more painted rocks and twigs to use.

Our inspiration came from Andy Goldsworthy, known for creating land art using natural objects and nature as his canvas. After collecting the items, we began to improvise and looked around to see what parts we can highlight. The team stumbled upon a trampoline. This inspired us to highlight the most prominent parts of the park: the logs, benches, trampolines, climbing ropes and trees. Ramya suggested creating a design around the tree, playing with the gradients of the leaves, while Willow and Greta created a small blanket out of the leaves.

My favourite part of this experience was designing the trampoline and logs. After designing the trampoline, a child went to the trampoline and played with our toolkit. Inspired by the iconic Yellow Brick Road, we created a small pathway using painted rocks. We created sunshine-like patterns around the logs to give them a pop of colour. It was fascinating to see how the materials we used reflected light as the sunset, and how the added colour highlighted certain areas.

The main feedback we received concerned not bringing the experience to the classroom. One of the suggestions was to allow people to create designs and decorate the classroom. Another recommendation was stomping on the leaves to create a more interactive experience.

I appreciate the approach of using natural objects and biodegradable materials. Looking back, we sometimes had to use materials that cannot be used again. Luckily, some of my classmates were able to reuse some of the materials for the next brief. Moving forward, it would be better to be more environmentally conscious when carrying out a project.