[Note: This is the second of five posts related to Nam-Ho Park’s talk and blog post on Mobile Storytelling. Links to my other posts are at the bottom of the page.]
As Nam-ho illustrates, home and place are deeply emotional. Read what happens when his father looks for the house he grew up in:
When I showed Google Earth for the first time to my dad on an iPad, the first thing he did was to look for the house he grew up in, deep in North Korea, having left it behind some 60 years ago during the Korean War. I saw the concentration and the emotion that poured over his face as he searched for his childhood home by scanning the geography but also his memory, desperately inferring its location through the landscape of streams, valleys and railroad tracks he remembered.
Arcade Fire’s awe-inspiring and highly personalized HTML5 interactive music video immediately came to mind when I read this, as well as a loose talk/presentation Aaron Louie gave at an InfoCamp 2010 session, The Design of Everyday Awesome Things. At the start of the Arcade Fire video, you’re prompted to “enter the address of the home where you grew up” and then to write a note to your young self. [Spoiler alert, jump to the next paragraph to avoid my spoiler.] The video culminates with you running down the streets near the home where you grew up, with this letter to your young self then appearing. It’s surprisingly moving and I highly recommend watching it if you haven’t already.
Aaron started off his session playing the Arcade Fire video, and got chocked up after watching it as he described the effect it had on him when he first watched it. His talk centered around why emotion matters in design and UX. As I’ve tweeted before, ”[User Experience] really boils down to emotion.” It’s how people feel about the experience of using X software or product. Aaron’s choice was spot on in getting us to think about the role of emotion in design. I was touched not only by the video, but his reaction to it.
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Links to the entire five-post series:
7th December 2011
