Spinning Wheel of Death Joy: turning a panic interactive experience to a delightful one.

Alternative Interaction For Spinning Wheel of The Death

In this mini RtD project, I focused on exploring the possibilities of turning the visual indicators on Mac OSX, the spinning wheel of death, into delightful interactions. In my research process, I investigated the history of the spinning wheel of death, related cultural memes, and functionality analogies such as interactive or motion 404 page. I applied interactive technology such as leap motion and creative coding to make my digital artifacts more provocative in the crafting process. I conclude with implications for research and practice in the alternative and interactive design space.

Usually, the spinning wheel of death gives people panic because it indicates the personal computer malfunctions. It has a negative indication in general. The original experience between the user and the wheel's spinning is very passive: users have nothing to interact or change besides watching and waiting. In this alternative design process, I wanted to investigate how the knowledge and interactions of the spinning wheel of death can be playful and delightful or mitigate the feeling of users' panic.

Discussion Questions:

What are the relationship between RtD and SCD (Speculative Critical Design)
How might RtD method benefits user-centered design? Will it resolve any constraints of UCD?
In The Interaction Design Research Triangle of Design Practice, Design Studies, and Design Exploration, Daniel Fallman argues that "combing there three activities distinguishes interactions design research from other disciplines, Do you agree with this statement? To what extend, should interaction design be "stand-alone" or being "distinguished"?

History Of Spinning Wheel of Death

The spinning wheel of death. Even hearing this term can cause most people to panic. The official name should be the spinning wait cursor or spinning watch. Some brief history of the wheel can be founded on here:

NextStep Era (2bit)

Mac OSX(24bit)

OS X El Capitan

As a visual indicator in graphical interface, spinning wheel of the death fulfill its functional purpose but definitely not delightful. In this research, I am seeking to reverse this symbol's initial indication and experiment with building a more interactive, playful, and enjoyable experience with it.

Reflective Recreating And Crafting A Spinning Wheel of Death

The first step I did is to avoid looking at the visual indication of the wheel. Instead, I just look at its symmetrical, colorful and geometrical forms. One of experimenting I did is to recreate its form manually. In this process, I found strangely satisfying from making wheel with compass, figuring out the mathematical relationship. This indicates that this symmetrical shape have potentials to be delightful beside we human apply it to an awful situation.

Examing the Memes: The humorous meaning adding to the Spinning Wheel of Death

Secondly, I examined the related memes cultures related this object in order to have more inspirations and exploration on the fun side of the spinning wheel of death.

So What about making people feel delightful instead of panic when they see this tiny circle up?

Applying Micro-interactions

Microinteractions convey system status, support error prevention, and communicate brand. They are initiated by a trigger, are single-purpose, and can make the experience engaging. ------Microinteractions in User Experience

I took this one-week project as an opportunity to explore how might I change the notion of the spinning wheel of death. One of the method is applying microinteractions to make user (player) experience more delightful. Some examples likes:

Chrome: no internet

404 page design

Rolling up the wheel just like rolling up your food wrap.

What about watching your wheel lost its way? I mean, this is also what we all feel right now. Try it >>>

Or having some micro-interaction with it such as dragging it and watch it bounce back. Try it >>>

More than an indicator: as an interactive and playful interface

Noticing the original wheel does not have "functionalities", another way to make user more engaged even when the backend of your computer is in a mess is to change this visual indicator to an interface so I decided to explore the possibilities of using the "spinning" and "color schema" of this wheel as an user interface. First of all, actions such as "spinning", "rotation" and "rolling" can be seen as a process that generates some outcome.

Final Approach: Experimental Instrument

In this process, in order to adding more interactive and playful layers, I was exploring the system of converting visual information such as color to sound with Scriabin Correspondence.

scrabin.mov

In fact, this process came with unexpected outcome: it was more disturbing rather than delightful. Scriabin Correspondence does not make this interface "delightful" but more annoying and weird. To be more harmonic and auditorily pleasing, I remapped sound with midi keys. if you had trouble opening, video is https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e35P0LkAxG-b085qiAvlAesOd1U5bnzj/view?usp=sharing

spinningwheelofjoy.mov

Instead of using mouse position, I used a an actual rotary encode as the controller. The scenario here is, imagining the users/audience is visually impairments, given a physical controller plus auditory feedback will be more engaging in this case. If you had trouble opening, video is drive.google.com/file/d/1BGw5AdKWM_JV2YuLIBD7N1G4YlAYYb7X/view?usp=sharing )