While I thought I uploaded this a long long ago, it turns out I didn't. So, here it is, at long last. It's beautiful! It's fantastic! Actually, it's my old phone, which was a piece of junk when it was working, and now it's a piece of scrap that it'd dead. I was able to label some of the parts just from having some knowledge about computer parts, like the microprocessor and the ROM, but I did a little research about how exactly a phone works and the more specific parts, like the digital/analog chips and how the sound processes through the machine. While I'm still convinced that most of these digital machines run primarily on magic, looking inside the phone and reading about it gave me a bit of a better understanding of how it functions.
Alright, now to do the DOET I missed about the functionality of a public place. Just to be original and a contrarian, I'll talk about the movie theatre I work at in Naples. Working 40-hour weeks over two summers, I know every nook and cranny of that place.
How does the layout of the space work?
You walk into a gigantic lobby to start off, which is pretty inviting, which basically leads you right to the sizable concession stand. The thing's impossible to miss, so any enticement to buy delicious (and overpriced) snack treats is going to hit you immediately, since you're staring at it as soon as you walk in. The theatre is bisected into two parts, one side having the first ten screens, the other having the other ten. Above each section is each screen, the film playing and the time, all in grabbing LED lights, so one who forgets where they're going can easily look at the screens and figure out what side and what screen their movie's at. Down the hallways, the same screens are used above each theater door, so if you recognized your specific title out in the lobby, it'll look exactly the same when you get to your theater.
How does the layout of the space not work?
On busy nights, the lobby can end up getting congested, even though it's quite huge. Partitions are put out for the line for concession, which is good crowd control, but sometimes people ignore it and go up to the stand anyway. Speaking of concession, the menu and prices of the foodstuffs alternates between gigantic ads for the food and drinks that show up every now and then. Only problem is when that happens, the menu's gone, and if you want a price of something, you'll have to wait for it to snap back to the menu screen. Also, down the left and right hallways, the doors have their theater numbers to the side of them, which at some angles are obscured. It might be more convenient if they were put next to the display above them like they are in the lobby, to add to the consistency.
What parts of the space work from a design point, but not for humans?
The two sides of the theater are mirrored, which probably made things a lot easier construction-wise. It was like building two theaters back-to-back with each other. Another design quirk is that from the hallways, it's not so easy to determine which theaters are the largest. The largest ones have double doors, and are toward the beginning of the hall, but from there on, it's not as discernible. People seem to get that the one toward the very back is the smallest, but it actually has the same size screen as some of the other smaller theaters, and the fact that there are less seats puts you closer to the screen, which makes it better, I think.
The types of errors people made with our piece:
I guess the only real problem we had was that some people didn't put their arm directly on the sensors, which is crucial. In an actual setting, this could be easily remedied by the stamper silently pushing the participant's arm up a bit, which makes sense with the environment, like you're being positioned by the doctor in a test he's conducting.
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