Interactive music boxes inspired by the Dong minority in rural China
- Hunan University, Queen Mary University of London and b00t Consultants Ltd.
- 2016
- Hengling Village, Hunan Region, PRC
- Nick Bryan-Kinns, Wei Wang, Jennifer Sheridan, Yi Shen, Lucia Marengo, Alessia Milo, Tongtong Ning, Yongmeng Wu, Xiang Xu, Yating Zou
- Website
- Presented at: Sino-Italy design center, Huaihua, China (Aug 2016)
- Presented at: Intersection Exhibition, Mile End Art Pavillion, London, UK (Sep 2016)
For this project, we designed, prototyped and tested four interactive music boxes that could communicate the Dong culture, a minority group that lives in rural China. The project also explored which research approaches could be used in cross-cultural contexts: situations when UX researchers seek to understand cultures or users foreign to their own.
In a team of ten, we built and run a mobile maker space using local materials in the Hengling village. We researched approaches to the design of the music boxes through observation, embodiment and interviews with locals, and we defined design concepts through brainstorming sessions. Next, we designed and prototyped four interactive music boxes using Arduino. Finally, we conducted usability testing with tourists, and we evaluated their usability and cultural representativeness with locals. The process followed a quick iterative design process.
The Hengling village
Observations of traditional craftsmanship
Organising insights from research
Prototype development in the maker space
A detail of Dong Shine, one of the music boxes
The evaluation of Dong Shine with the inhabitants