Reflection Document

Critical Reflection

Looking back on the project, I believe the most valuable outcome was not learning a specific technical skill, but developing a deeper understanding of how design judgement shapes user experience. In my original proposal, I wanted to explore the aftermath of war without directly depicting conflict itself. Rather than showing violence, I was interested in how users might experience change through their own actions and gradually develop an emotional connection to the environment. Although the final project differs significantly from my initial technical plan, it remains faithful to this core intention. Users are not watching a story about war unfold. Instead, they participate in a process of restoration, deciding what to bring back into a damaged landscape. The experience ultimately became less about what happened in the past and more about what the user chooses to rebuild in the present.

At the beginning of the project, I identified several key values that I wanted the design to embody: indirectness, accumulation, and openness. These values continued to guide design decisions throughout development and are visible in the final outcome.

The first value, indirectness, influenced almost every aspect of the project. I deliberately avoided representing war through explicit imagery such as weapons, destruction, or conflict. Instead, I focused on absence, quietness, and recovery. The ruined landscape, empty space, and gradual return of life suggest the existence of war without showing it directly. Through this process, I realised that interaction design does not always need to represent an event itself. Sometimes it can be more powerful to represent the traces that an event leaves behind and allow users to interpret those traces through interaction.

The second value, accumulation, became the foundation of the system design. The warmth system was not created simply as a visual effect. It was designed to express the idea that healing happens gradually through many small actions. Each placement contributes only a tiny change to the environment, but over time those changes accumulate into a visible transformation. The interpolation system ensures that warmth never increases instantly. Instead, it slowly approaches its target value, creating a sense of progression rather than reward. Reflecting on this decision, I realised that the system became a metaphor for restoration itself. Users rarely notice a single action changing the world, but they can perceive the overall shift in atmosphere. This mirrors how meaningful change often occurs in reality: through repeated actions rather than dramatic moments.

The third value, openness, shaped the overall structure of the experience. There is no fixed sequence, no objective, and no correct ending. Users can combine sounds, forms, and gestures in different ways, producing unique outcomes each time. However, one important lesson from testing was that openness does not automatically create meaningful freedom. In early versions, some users felt uncertain because they did not know where to begin. This revealed a tension between openness and clarity. As a result, I introduced a guided onboarding system while preserving the open-ended nature of the experience. This taught me that freedom often requires structure. A design can remain interpretive and ambiguous while still providing enough guidance for users to engage confidently.

Another area of reflection involves the interaction design principles used throughout the project. Rather than applying principles as standard usability techniques, I attempted to integrate them into the conceptual meaning of the work itself.

For example, real-time feedback is usually understood as providing an immediate response after an action occurs. In my project, I wanted feedback to become part of the action rather than something that happened afterwards. This led to the decision to implement real-time growth during hold gestures. Initially, growth only appeared when the user released the mouse button. During testing, participants described the interaction as feeling unresponsive because nothing appeared to happen while they were holding. To address this issue, I changed the system so that growth begins after a short threshold and continues while the user is still pressing. This transformed the interaction from a delayed response into an ongoing process. The user is no longer waiting for a result; they are witnessing the result emerge in real time. In this way, feedback becomes inseparable from the action itself.

I also reinterpreted the principle of progressive disclosure. Traditional interfaces often rely on labels, instructions, or tutorial windows to explain functionality. While these methods are effective, they conflicted with the atmosphere I wanted to create. The project is intended to feel contemplative and immersive, so highly visible interface elements risked breaking that mood. Instead, I used glowing edge bars, pulse animations, and a central ripple to guide discovery. Users learn through exploration rather than explicit instruction. This decision was not entirely successful at first. Early testing showed that many participants struggled to discover the hidden controls. However, instead of abandoning the concept, I iterated on the guidance system until users could reliably find the interface without the experience feeling overly instructional. This process demonstrated that immersion and usability are not opposing goals, but factors that must be carefully balanced through iteration.

Two design judgements had a particularly significant impact on the final outcome. The first was the decision to maintain a hidden interface. The most obvious solution would have been to permanently display the sound and form selection panels. This would have increased usability and reduced confusion. However, it would also have shifted the experience closer to a conventional web application. I decided to preserve the hidden interface because discovery was closely connected to the emotional tone of the project. The landscape is intended to feel quiet and reflective, so I wanted interaction to emerge gradually rather than present itself immediately. Testing confirmed that subtle visual guidance could improve discoverability while preserving immersion. This decision taught me that design judgement often involves balancing competing goals rather than selecting a single correct answer.

The second major judgement was abandoning the original Three.js approach in favour of a 2D parallax system. Initially, I believed a 3D environment would create a stronger sense of immersion. However, as development progressed, I realised that the project did not require realistic spatial simulation. What it needed was a gentle sense of depth that supported the visual atmosphere. By replacing Three.js with layered SVG environments and CSS transforms, I was able to simplify the technical complexity while achieving a visual result that better aligned with the project's aesthetic direction. This experience challenged my assumption that more advanced technology automatically leads to better design outcomes. In reality, reducing complexity often allowed the concept to become clearer.

Through these iterations, I came to understand that implementation and concept development are not separate processes. Many of the project's technical systems ultimately became expressions of its underlying themes. The warmth interpolation system expresses gradual healing. The hold gesture expresses time, attention, and care. The parallax environment expresses a world that still exists and waits to be changed. Rather than functioning as isolated technical features, these systems contribute directly to the meaning of the experience.

Ultimately, I believe the project's greatest success lies not in its visual outcome, but in the way design judgements were translated into interactive systems. The project taught me that interaction design is not only about deciding what users can do. It is about deciding why they do it, how the system responds, and how meaning emerges through that relationship. The most important lesson I learned is that successful interaction design occurs when conceptual intentions and technical decisions continuously inform one another throughout the design process.

Comparison with Peer Creative Tools

A useful comparison came from observing my peers’ creative tools during the studio. Elaine’s project was an interactive fish pond. Users could drag different fish from the left side into the pond, and once the fish entered the space, they started swimming. Different areas of the pond triggered three different pitches, so as more fish were added, the sound became denser and more layered. What I found successful in her work was the direct relationship between action, movement and sound. The interaction was immediately understandable: drag a fish, place it, and hear the system change. The accumulation of sound was also very clear because the user could directly hear the space becoming more active.

Another peer created a language-based adventure tool. The user selected different parts of a sentence, such as nouns, verbs and prepositions. After choosing one word, the interface moved to the next position in the sentence, and at the end these choices formed a strange and interesting sentence about an adventurer’s action. This project used a more structured form of interaction. Unlike Elaine’s open-ended sound pond, this tool guided the user through a sequence. The user still had freedom, but that freedom was organised through grammar and order. The result was playful because the system turned small word choices into an unexpected narrative.

These two projects helped me reflect on my own design judgement. Elaine’s project showed the strength of immediate feedback and clear cause-and-effect. The sentence project showed the strength of guided structure and sequential decision-making. Compared with them, my project sits somewhere between open-ended play and guided interaction. Echoes of Peace does not give the user a strict path like the sentence tool, but it also cannot be completely open without guidance, because the hidden interface and emotional atmosphere require users to understand how to begin. This made me realise that openness still needs structure. A poetic interaction does not mean the user should feel lost.

The comparison also made me think more carefully about the relationship between interaction form and meaning. In Elaine’s fish pond, dragging works well because the project is about placing living things into an environment and hearing the pond become fuller. In the sentence project, step-by-step selection works well because language needs order before it can become a sentence. In my project, tap, hold and drag support a slower idea of rebuilding. A quick tap feels like placing one memory, a hold feels like spending time with something, and a drag feels like leaving a trace across the ruined space. Through this comparison, I understood that interaction should not be chosen only because it is interesting. It should match the kind of meaning the project wants to produce.