UXA2023 Yasamin Asadi - Designing for a post-lockdown metaverse

With the worldwide population of adults over the age of 65 growing faster than any other according to the United Nations, considering their voice in designing the 3D embodiment of the internet (the Metaverse) is necessary for moving away from the deficit model of ageing, especially coming out of the pandemic. This presentation advocates for an ethnographic, co-design approach with older adults for those looking to design in a fully immersive space.

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2023 Friday, 25 August 2023 Captioned by: Kasey Allen & Bernadette McGoldrick
2. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 71 STEVE BATY: Our last talk before lunch is from Yasamin, who will look at designing for a post - it is around designing for the metaverse. Join me in welcoming Yasamin to the stage. Thank you. (APPLAUSE) YASAMIN ASADI: Hi, everyone. My name is Yasamin Asadi. Today I am going to talk about designing for a post-lockdown metaverse. I am a PhD
3. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 72 student at QUT and I also work as a UX designer at Deswik. I am happy to be here today. The work that I am going to share today began in 2020, when I started my masters at QUT. At the time I wanted to know how we can improve social technology, so I could keep in touch with my grandmother easier. In the beginning, I was looking for a way to stay connected without just using gadgets. I felt like the text messaging doesn't communicate the energy that goes on between two people. I find them intriguing and we don't give you a sense of thing to present with someone else. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, people all around the world faced restrictions. In Australia, all the adults were advised to stay at home and avoid travelling or leaving their houses, basically, aside from essential trips. As a result, a lot of technologies emerged to keep in contact with everybody else, one of them being Zoom. The restrictions highlighted the need to research how adults were adjusting their life to the circumstances of the pandemic and if their technology needs were changing. Of course, there is also a lot of other types of connections that can happen. You can do a bit of tap in your Smart voice and send the vibration to someone else. You can play an online game with somebody to invite them to come and play with you, something that you love. With many people living away from their loved ones in different time zones, you need to invest in a synchronous social technologies, so you can keep in touch with people even if they are not online at the time you want them to be. The metaverse is coming to blur the boundaries between the digital and physical world. Think about it as the Internet but 3D and immersive. It will give us all new opportunities to stay connected to others. For example, there is a lot of concerts being held in different
4. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 73 virtual worlds, like Ariana Grande or Travis Scott have held concerts and you can watch them, they are fun. Other well-known types of virtual worlds are Fortnite, Warcraft or Minecraft. A virtual world is a community that is built and maintained digitally. To achieve the state of the metaverse that we aspire to go, which is blurring the boundaries between the mutual and physical world, we need to go through three-phases of digitalisation. The first phase is called digital model. A digital model is virtual representation of a physical entity. Here, the physical and digital world, they don't really communicate with each other. The second phase is called a digital shadow. A digital shadow is a virtual representation of a physical entity which is impacted by the physical entity. There is no impact coming from the virtual world to the physical world but there is impact coming from physical to the virtual. Finally, the third one is called the digital twin, this is what dynamic virtual representation would look like. The physical and digital world would impact each other. By going through each phase of digitalisation, we will have more opportunities to engage with other people. For example, right now we have avatars, with we can communicate through avatars in the virtual worlds and research is going on around about how to enhance the physical image and body language of avatars. Just the conversation flows more naturally. Another type of keeping in touch with other people in the virtual world is holograms. In Sydney Jewish Museum, there is an exhibition called the Reverberations: A Future of Memory, where three Holocaust survivors have sat down and answered 1100 questions, so you can go and discuss with them their experience and just talk to them within their holograms. Back to the original question, we wanted to see how we can
5. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 74 improve the user experience of connections over distance, how do older adults use technologies during the pandemic and the lockdown time? Also we want to see how technology could help them to adjust their lives to the circumstances of the pandemic. To answer these questions, I conducted three rounds of interviews with 13 older adults residing in Australia at the time. The first round was conducted between May-June of 2020. At the time all states in Australia were under a form of lockdown. This round of interviews, I wanted to know how was their life before and after the pandemic? If their lives have changed and if their technological needs have changed? The second round was conducted during August 2020, this time a lot of the states in Australia were under a road map to come out of lockdown, so I wanted to see if the novelty effect played a role in how they were adjusting their technological needs. The third one in October 2021, with Melbourne-based participants in particular, because Melbourne had the longest lockdown period, so I wanted to know how they lived their life during the lockdown and if technology was actually helping them? The theme of slowness was generated after the three steps of the thematic analysis process. I wanted to clarify the definition of slowness in this research. It refers to how the participants sense the passage of time or how they have more time to curate activities or take control of their lives. Slowness was experienced differently from one person to the next. When the pandemic happened, a lot of activities also at peoples' houses were cancelled or moved online, freeing up a lot of activities and giving participants a lot of free time to slow down their lives and think about what is going to happen. I would like to acknowledge the fact that not everybody enjoyed lockdown or not everybody felt like they slowed down. It was also repeated in a lot of other countries with different coverts of people.
6. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 75 Nurses in Singapore were reporting that despite having a high stress job during those years, they were feel like the time was passing slow still. As I mentioned earlier, we began this study to understand how peoples' technological needs changed during the pandemic and how the slowness was demonstrated. This comes from a human action perspective and the previous studies that I mentioned about the slowness, they were coming from more of a psychology or sociology point of views, so they weren't discussing technologies. I want to talk about the findings from now on and how the wide range of experiences of slowing down, modified social interactions and technology use, depending upon peoples' circumstances, relationships and attitudes is one of most notable findings. There are three design pathways that I am going to talk about today. They emerge from our methodology and they are coming to you to advocate for a more user-driven design experience, instead of starting off from a designer-led perspective, like Alina mentioned yesterday, and skated out to include a lot more people. These considerations were especially important when we move onto the metaverse. Because the metaverse is going to be considered immersive and it will be all around us and we can't turn off our laptop and move away from our gadgets, it is more important to think about what users actually want. The first pathway is called the Agency Pathway. We found that older adults really enjoyed being more in control of their time and how they were able to curate their own activities and their activities to develop their new routines, wished they were perceiving it as slower. This points to design and technologies that supports a sense of control, that the slowing down is happening because of external circumstances or whether it is coming from their bodily changes. The agency pathway can be found in having greater power over one's schedule or enabling them to adjust their
7. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 76 routines to the circumstances of their lives. Changes in the situation due to the pandemic caused older adults to reflect upon themselves and develop new hobbies and routines. For example, one of our participants mentioned the early stages of lockdown were marvellous because "You got to do all the things you have been meaning to do for ages. It encouraged me to go for walks and do knitting which I haven't done for 20 years and encouraged me to do some sewing which has been hovering like a guilty conscience forever". Revisiting an old hobby was something she was able to do because she had more time on her hands. A lot of her clubs were cancelled and she couldn't meet up with her friends and she turned herself to the circumstances of her house. Surprisingly, this is coming from a second interview and the state she was residing in had ended their lockdown but she was still continuing with this new hobby that she picked up during the pandemic. I would like to argue that the notion of reflection should be considered while we design as well, and in lots of peoples' circumstances. We observed two kind of reflections happening in our participants. The first type is called the reflection triggered by circumstances. During the lockdown, having to slow down, many people reflect upon one type of technology they want moving forward. Some of our participants upgraded their phones or their data plans, they purchased new technology, so they were looking for new ways to stay connected to others. They were looking for more efficient technology but they were still finding some aspects of this communication frustrating. They were seeking better types of communication. The other type of reflection was organic reflection. This happens when you just have more time on your hands between your activities, so you get to think about what is happening in your life and you can make
8. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 77 changes and adjust it to your own needs. Following the changes that happened because of the lockdown, a lot of activities got cancelled and people didn't really have a lot of social commitments outside of their houses. They had more time to adjust the activities that they wanted to their own routine and follow their own pace. Moving onto the digital world, the current form of interaction is through avatars. Avatars are the digital embodiment of people, whether they are true to form or they are completely different. A lot of researchers are actually working on the physical aspects of the avatar and how we can communicate within our avatars. Something to note is that in the metaverse, you are not going to necessarily communicate with humans. There will be a lot of parts, there will be Smart assistance, there will be NPCs and designing for them will be very important moving forward. We also should consider different scenarios of these interactions in the virtual move while we move forward. One study showed that when people had to jump from a height in the virtual world, they would perform better when they had a robot as their avatar. Once they had a human form, they were pursuing this act as dangerous so they didn't want to jump as high as their robots. Another one found that when people were supposed to wave back to someone in the digital world, they would rather do it to a human avatar. They perceived that as scary. This proves that we need to design different avatars and different interaction types for different contexts. Each person will have many different sides and they might not want to show it to everybody at the same time. This is something for you to consider once we reach the metaverse. Once we reach the state where we don't need our gadgets any more to just enter the virtual world, this will be something to consider, what face of ourselves are we going to present?
9. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 78 To sum up. The Agency Pathway advocates for supporting greater power over one's personal schedule or activities or enabling a person to adjust the situation to their own needs. Current virtual worlds and technologies that are on the road to become part of the metaverse are designer-led. We put on our VR goggles and talk to the holograms and they are all designed by the designers and we need to consider more of what the user wants and give them more power over their own schedule and routines. The second pathway is called the Preferred Interaction Pathway. Promising design direction for technology for a slower life, this understands the qualities of social interactions that people experience online. What their preferred devices should be and how do they prefer this form of communication between themselves? Looking at the current forms of communications technologies, our participants experience insights about the nature of interactions that they want in their lives moving forward. In collaborating work, this has been a barrier between communication and collaboration but this is also true when it comes to social technologies and relationships over distance. For example, one of our participants mentioned "I found that some of the Zoom happy hour things were getting to me a bit. I felt like I am one of the ones that's single. They were couples and they would sit there with their wine and it made me feel different to them. It was making me feel a little bit not necessarily good, whereas I don't feel like that when I am working out with them". These sorts of screen-based interactions, where people are confined within a tiny little rectangle and the emphasis is just on the individuals makes a lot of people self-conscious and this will lead to not have a natural flow of conversation and it can also make some people or a participant feel alone. These are for what calls the consideration of design of social technologies once we want to move fully virtual.
10. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 79 Also sometimes the activities that the people, such as transport or garden clubs, were not applicable when we moved online during the pandemic. One of our participants mentioned "All the guys, widowers or bachelors who live on their own and I have just rung them up, not to discuss the world or not, just how is it going? A couple of them said if you're not going to talk about transport, I am not interested, they call it on and off topic. I didn't want to talk about off topic things and that is an eye opener". As we can see, the activity that bonded that group of people was cancelled when they moved online during the pandemic. This particular participant thought that they were friends besides - apart from that mutual activity. How can we design to support this source of activities moving online? The business model and the designer of current social platforms are to appear to a lot of people and they want to gather as much users as they want around the same time. This is something that our participants didn't wish to continue during their slower pace of life, they wanted smaller social circles where they could bond over mutual interests or just feel like themselves and feel like they are connecting more naturally. Also one thing to note about once we move into the metaverse, is the matter of privacy. Our participants were talking about their privacy concerns, especially when it came to Smart assistance. For example, one of them would lower his voice when he spoke about his Google home mini so the device wouldn't pick up on our conversation, or another one was telling me that while she was outside gardening, or she enjoyed her jog but she didn't know what initiated that conversation. This shows us that these sorts of communications in the virtual world, they can be enjoyable but only when the timing is right. Once we reach that state privacy becomes more essential. We will not only be interacting with humans and this might not be something that everybody enjoys. We are going to talk
11. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 80 about the format and context of the communication and when the timing is right, that communication will become enjoyable. Overall, the Preferred Interaction Pathway allows us to understand that the design qualities of interaction that suits peoples' needs, bearing in mind how accessible they want to be and what is the format that best matters with their life. Existing platforms have all sorts of joining and participation scenarios but this was something that our participants weren't looking for when they had to move online for the communication during the pandemic years. Finally, the third principle is called the Adapting to Social Circumstances and Natural Rhythms. Slowness is not only about the pace of life. You can be on the move but you should be moving really fast as well, but you still think about your life as very much slow because you are your own clock. Another example is cooking can be thought of as a slow act, in contrast to ordering take-out, which is fast food. When you decide to cook, you pay attention to the process and the material and you go through the process and you can perceive it as slow. As a side effect of staying at home, people turned their attention more to the surroundings of their home. The disruption that happened outside of their houses was bringing attention to the routines that they were performing and how their lives were adjusting to these circumstances. One of our participants expressed the importance of the natural rhythms of daylight, bed time and being on their own clock, she said "My garden never looked as good because it has never had as much time devoted to it as at the moment. I would get messages on my phone saying 'Where are you? We started the Zoom meeting' and I was like 'No, there is still a bit of light, I will join you at 6 o'clock instead of 5, I can still do gardening, why would I come in and sit down and chat'?" Technology can disrupt the natural rhythms, the body's behavioural changes that follow the 24 hour cycle and response to
12. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 81 light and dark and daily routines and rituals are important to older adults but they are very personal and it changes from one person to the next. Although our participants turned to video conferencing, technologies to replicate their own forms of identity and routines and social practices, they were finding it to be frustrating and they didn't want to be available at all times. By slowing down our tone, they shifted their priorities to more personal activities as well. One of our participants changed his main hobby from travelling to sorting out old photographs and he mentioned "The main thing is I realised that I feel like I am 71 now. Even active travellers know once they get to their late 70s they slow down. My friend who is 78, he is less interested in travelling than he was previously. Some sort of conscious I am about that and we have lost two years of travelling. I think some people might realise age and health issues have sort of caught up with them in the two years without them realising that things have changed". It is really important to note that as we age, our capacities also change and that leads us to rhythms changing as well. This is not necessarily a bad thing, so let's move on from that mindset, it just means we need to acknowledge the fact that our bodies will change and so will our schedules. This is also why they are calling for considering social relations and the rhythms of people that we want to design for them. Building technology allows social connections around rhythms and social connections with those hobbies will foster more sustainable communications over distance. This reduces social isolation and this is what a lot of people enjoy being in virtual reality games and building upon that online community. The sense of community that comes from it is what enriches their experience and that is what fosters their communication. Also one thing to note is how to move away from constant
13. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 82 interruptions that are caused by notifications to accommodate peoples' personal rhythms. We can change the settings of our devices and we can go ahead and find those settings and but we argue that a design that does not need altering as we use it is something to consider once we are moving forward with our slower pace of life. This becomes more important once we get to a set of metaverse. When we have a token of log-in and we don't need our devices and it is just all around us, there is so much that we can control in our physical and digital space to show or hide. We need to be conscious of peoples' rhythms and their natural body clock once we want to design for them during the metaverse. To sum it up, our study of older people residing in Australia and experiencing lockdown, revealed they lived life at a slower pace, embracing some aspects of the slowness and struggling with others. We derived three design pathways from the experiences of slowness to inform technology design moving forward. Thank you. (APPLAUSE) STEVE BATY: Do we have questions for Yasamin? >> Hi. I wanted to ask if you see these principles of design working anywhere else besides the metaverse? YASAMIN ASADI: Yes, actually my work was - after the theme of slowness emerged, I was looking at slow technologies at first and I was working on IOT technologies once this became very obvious that this is how people want to slow down their lives and live their lives. The metaverse is just a natural progression from where I started but I feel like this is something that we can take onto any aspect of design that we want.
14. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 83 >> Hi, thanks for your talk. I like this idea of designing for the natural rhythms because another way you could frame that is sort of designing with health and wellbeing in mind. Are there any other health or wellbeing considerations you think we should think about when designing for the digital or physical world? YASAMIN ASADI: Good, yes. I think just given the user - the agency to change it as much as they want. I understand we cannot have design that will suit everybody's needs but giving them the opportunity to change it as much as they want, this will result in changes that can happen as their body changes, even if their health is deteriorating or it is getting better, they can change the design of whatever it is for a particular social communication to what they want. For example, if I am - let's say I have a prolonged disease and it is getting worse on some days and better on some days, I can adjust my technology to not give notifications during those worse days and send my loved ones an alert that I am feeling better when I am feeling better actually. STEVE BATY: Any other questions? >> I am going to ask a basic question and now when I hear metaverse, I think Meta, just the former Facebook and VR goggles that are too heavy for me. I liked your definition at the beginning on more of a twoway flow between worlds with very little resistance and as a gamer, I definitely know the digital world to some form. What does it look like as a future for you, rather than talking about goggles, but if we are talking about a twoway connection, I guess, rather than being a hard split between the middle - can you talk more about what would that look like if you are there and it is not on that kind of weird goggles side and more on the,
15. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 84 hey, we can do things? Could you give colour to that, maybe? YASAMIN ASADI: Personally what I was struggling with was standing in long queues. I was thinking if I can stand my avatar, my virtual form, in that queue and if they needed my human form, I would go back and stay there. As I mentioned, the definition that I gave is the definition that I have for metaverse. It is currently up for debate in the academy space. It is unclear and it is not set in stone yet. As I mentioned, for me it is something that I can have my physical life and my virtual life and these two will impact each other as much as they can but it is not like - for example, if I am getting hurt in the virtual world, it will impact me in the physical world, I would say. STEVE BATY: Yasamin, somebody asked if they could see the last slide, if you could go back a slide? I am guessing there is a photo that they want to take. There it is for whoever asked for it and requested that. Thank you so much. Please join me in thanking, Yasamin. (APPLAUSE)