human magic

Human Magic

Bringing the essence of human connections to remote collaboration.

What makes collaborative work so strong and feel so good that it's s hard to replicate remotely? It's the human factor. We gathered insights about users through a rapid, intensive exploratory process with our clients. We invite them to create a new term with a new purpose and a new way of thinking about remote collaborative work. We coined the term "human magic," which describes what is missing in remote collaboration and what would usually connect us when we work together in a shared physical space. We felt this magic when collaborating within our team, but our interviewees also described this 'thing' that they thought when heads go aligned, and this feeling of connection, passion, and joy emerged.

After we built this framework around human magic, we could project our vision on the current remote work setup and started reimagining audio-video interactions during collaborative meetings. We suggested reimagining how work should be done. We envision collaboration to become much more of an immersive experience. Shifting our focus from efficiency and productivity to well-being, joy, and using our senses. Away from the single stream of audio and back to honest communication.

Context

Student project at Umeå Institute of Design

Keywords

UX, Concept, Rapid Prototyping, Animation, Design

Year

2020

Team

Ruoyun Wang, Romy Koppert, Alex Widua

What is magic?

To be able to have a shared understanding of our concept, we created this experience video. We built upon our meal metaphor from our co-creation workshop and displayed a dinner scene with friends where magic is able flow freely.

Experience Videos

We imagine that actual eye contact should become the new norm in online communication. Eye contact can create intimacy and trust which is a base for a natural conversation.

When we express ourselves, our body language follows. The frame we are locked in should not cut off your body language.

We are removing the filter that prevented intimacy and making conversations and interactions more realistic. We should be able to come physically closer together in conversations.

We envision that we can bring back the value of the direction of input and output collaboration. Separating audio by using spatial audio sources will allow us to make sense of the conversation, the way it naturally happens.

We reimagine remote collaboration so that our communication can flow again, our human magic can flow again.

Process of designing for human magic

Little experiments

Experience prototyping helped us to bring this abstract knowledge to life and made it graspable for us, we realised what kind of changes we would need in a new remote collaboration setting.

We explored how our senses and bodily capabilities are limited by current online communication and experimented with small things like reorienting the frame and view to allow us to show each other our body language, desk and notes.

The placement of the camera plays a huge role in how we perceive people during remote work.

Different camera placements allowed us to actually look people in the eye again and come a bit closer to this concept of real human interactions.

Then we explored splitting up the direction of audio and video of multiple participants to allow us to have more face-to-face interactions. We were impressed by how well this little experiment had already worked.

Behind the Concept

Our working prototype, filmed from a user's perspective, conveyed the experience of remote work to our clients and tutors. It helped us gain insights into the limitations of remote work and draw connections to previous findings. Providing each participant a separate screen was the strongest concept we tested.

This project was part and a deliverable of the professional product course at Umeå Institute of Design as a collaboration with Konftel, mentoring by Trieuvy Luu, Workshop Training with Josh Lenn from Bold&Confident in 2020. The overall aim of the course was to understand how audio-video interactions be designed to be interwoven into the flow of distributed work in ways that enable professionals to bring the best of themselves and their skill sets into play in work practices that are imaginative, expansive, and energising.