This project was a co-design research project with the objective of understanding how people perceive and use the concept of "magic" in their reality and the reality of others. This project was done in collaboration with Erin Shaw, Marley Hosier, and Emily Ridinger. We designed a collaborative workshop in order to gain information about our objectives using concepts of co-design and making-driven toolkits. We conducted our analysis by doing cross examination between the workshop homework, the actual homework, and participant's words/body language during the workshop. We discovered that magic is perceived to be something that can enhance someone's life positively to break or aid in routine. It was also seen that implementation of what is magical in everyday life is more whimsical while personal interests lie within more dark magic.
Preconceptions
These were our preconceptions of what we thought was going to come of the study.
Workshop Plan and Instructions
Participant Homework/ANswers
In our homework, we decided to never mention magic to keep internal biases/thoughts from forming before the workshops. Our questions included "What is a character (real or fictional) you identify with?" "What fairy tale resonates most with you?" and "Unicorns or dragons?" We also included a consent form for our workshop.
Workshop Toolkits
Our toolkits included a 2D activity as well as a 3D activity. The 2D activity focused on pictures of daily actions and sharpies. This allowed each participant to use images and choose what they want most represented in their "typical Saturday." The pen also allowed for creative freedom. The next activity had a 3D toolkit that had different blocks, paper cutouts, little figurines, pompoms, and pipe cleaners. This allowed for the participant to create and allow different things to interact with one another which leads to a different type of insights from the 2D toolkit.
Map Your Typical Saturday
In this activity, people tended towards the printed pictures and words describing more personal aspects of those activities.
Visualize Magic
This was the first activity in the workshop that mentioned the word "magic." This task came as a surprise to our participants and everyone had very different creations but all had to do with narrative and vibrancy.
Add Magic to your peer's saturday
This activity tasked participants to use a pink sharpie and add "magic" to a peer's typical Saturday. We found that it was most common to positively enhance life rather than completely change it with magic. There was also a lot of aesthetic changes like sparkly toothpaste which is something everyone had listed on the paper.
Results and Post-Analysis
We discovered that magic is perceived to be something that can enhance someone's life positively to break or aid in routine. It was also seen that implementation of what is magical in everyday life is more whimsical while personal interests lie within more dark magic. In addition to this, we saw that magic was very visual and aesthetic of life in perception. It was also seen to be much more complex and physical in their imagined realities which led us to think about how to lead individuals to think about magic in a way where they can feel like their life is truly magical.