For the first week, I don’t have a clear image of the direction. I want to explore the extended reality, but I not sure if it is the best form to express my concerns and questions. In terms of the first step, I list some questions I concern most try to narrow down the scope.

for my project I want to:

– explore how the pandemic would transform the impact of communication?
– build a connection between people, and let stories come out from the connection
– design to the human needs for now, but still stay remain after 2021The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted nonverbal communication. Advised to wear a mask and keep our distance from each other, we’ve had to find substitutes for the greetings, gestures, and other nonverbal cues we used to take for granted. The tone of voice, eye contact, facial expressions, body language—all of these are nonverbal signals. And they’re crucial to how humans communicate because they help us navigate our relationships with others.
– Due to the COVID we’re all being pushed into an online status.
– we don’t want to touch an item if you can’t confirm it is safe and clean. we are living in a touchless world.
– which way can bring people back together again but in safe, socially-distanced spaces?
– Is there any more extreme case, if you can’t speak if you don’t have nonverbal cues, how do we communicate?
– how to know each other more efficiently?

Then I jumped to the idea of finding the bond between humans. I recalled a legend that comes from Chinese tradition, called the red thread of fate. It is a belief that is popular in Asian culture, and it is similar to the idea of the soulmate. It says that “an invisible red string connects those who are destined to meet regardless of time, place, or circumstances.

– That makes me think about what is the red thread of fate in the current context, especially in a digital world?
– how to make invisible things visible?
– If physical location, memories, the trails we leave on social media are the start point of the red thread of fate, will it lead us to?

This project that inspired me a lot is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xA4M8n-zMc
it’s a Kinetic Poetry project. This interactive shows the delicate movement of the contexts. Words on the screen drift around and are drawn to each other, gradually sticking end to end, and accumulating into phrases. These phrases arrange themselves into successive lines of abstract poetry. Although I didn’t understand Japanese, this fascinated me. Because I immediately thought that in Chinese, words can be divided into many parts, and recombination of them will produce some new meanings. I might explore that a little bit.

so here are my initial ideas:

I might build up an interface, people might input their bios, by analyzing those contexts, use digital ways to rebuild the connection.

Although I do not know the final direction of this project, I still hope to use XR technology at the right opportunity. And I did some research on that. I might find out where they meet next week.