Needfinding Exercise

Our assignment was to explain what it feels like to be in the Stanford Papua New Guinea Sculpture (Tiki) Garden.


Intro
You can experience the garden with your five senses. You can touch the sculptures. You can smell the wood, the rotting leaves and the night air. You can even play the aligator drums to feel a part of the ancient beat. Depending on the lighting what you see with your eyes changes. Lighting can make the friendly seem ominous. Everything is accesible through the senses. What if you were limited to one sense? Hearing?

Design concept: Represent a 3D dimensional space to a blind person. Give them a sense of being transported, overwhelmed, drawn into the stories behind each totem pole.

Flow
Stage 1 Picture a guy with his eyes open. Close the eyes and zoom in on his head. Show sound waves coming from his ears.

Stage 2. Approach the garden leaving the sounds of campus, blending in quietly is the sound of quiet african drums. The sound reaches a crecendo and then zeros out followed by a crash of sounds coming from every direction. A wild interplay of sounds eminating from the objects all at the same time they tell you their stories. You can't tell them apart, it overwhelms. Audio: Screaming, shouting, praise, drumming, dance, storytelling, moaning, men chanting, laughter, babies crying and water splashing. These are the sounds eminate from the totem poles in front of you that commemorate their life. Stepping into the garden is like stepping into someone's memories. Each pole captures the most meaningful event and condenses it. The cacophony of experience either makes you recoil or it draws you. You visit each pole to hear their stories. Listen

Stage 3 Each sculpture has it's own it's own music and it's own story. They challenge you to decipher to understand the message and ultimately yourself. You enter the garden and approach each pole one at a time.

Sculpture 1: Entanglement of life (center middle)- Man fights to survive. It's connected interconncted and things are crawlig over each other. Man dominates. On top, on bottom. What is your position?

Scultpure 2: The spirituality of Black Magic (right foreground) - Witchdoctors, stepping in and out of time, masked faces, wild music, rapid drumming and wails.

Sculpture 3: What's the point of reproducing (center foreground)- Images of death. We see snakes and women. These reptiles suceessively moving down to the ground, ending ultimately in the woman's womb. It asks you, What's the point of reproducing if we are going to die? Audio: Screams, wailing, frantic drumming, ominous, woman's voice asking the question and not finishing the last word.

Sculpture 4: Home (left background) - Fishing, jokes, smiling, birthays, play. This is an organized happy sculpture. Audio: Lively african beats and laughter

Scultpure 5: Protectoer (left far background)- picture of a woman looking out over the landascape she is placed high, looking out to see the future. She sees the cycles of life, her people growing. Moving up the pole is a seriies of patterns each one with succesively more circles - like they are used for counting.

Scultpure 6: Student - (off-center farbackground) scultpure is squatting. At night from far away his feature change, the lighting makes him ominous, but isn't everything frightening when we don't understand. Close up his features take on that of a thinker, a student observing the gathering of sculptures. Like us he is trying to make sense of it all. When you get close and observe, things become clear, needs are found.

About my process
The garden sits on an unassuming yet busy intersection on Stanford's campus. At first it is underwhelming and then immediately surreal. The busyness of the campus, it's ordered buildings and bright vistas, meet the sculpture garden enclosed in dark trees, transporting you to another place and time. How can I take you there and help you experience what I felt when I visited the garden? To be honest I had no clue. I arrived at the Tiki garden after a dance rehearsal. My friend was headed to his dorm for much needed sleep and offered to spend a little time with me. I'm so glad he did becuase he was a poet and therefore a great guinea pig (forgive the unintended pun) to communicate his experience. What I didn't realize was how much I would rely on him to help me "re-see" the place. The words I was feeling were scary, dark, secret, private, native, culture, art and tribe. These words don't give you a sense of experience though. We basically went around observing several sculptures and sharing observations. Through this exercise I learned that needfinding is largely listening, using intuition, and integrating experience. Finally all of this is highly subjective, therefore It's key to incorporate other peoples experiences of a product to gain those insights you, the designer, may miss.