UX of Pigeons

Design an embodied experience revealing our relationship with pigeons in the urban environment.

Timeframe: Monday 5 October - Sunday 12 November

Team members: Ruth, Malayaka, Ivy, Rayanne

Research methods: AEIOU, Love Letter and Breakup Letter

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Week 1 Monday 30 October - Sunday 5 November 

Secondary research

We each picked one reading and shared our findings. I learnt facts about pigeons and the impact of the human world on them. We all realised pigeons had far more depth and history than we assumed.

Fig. 1 books and articles we read and mindmaps of our thoughts

Love and Breakup Letter  

We each wrote a love letter and break up letter to pigeons, exploring our personal experiences with pigeons. We read aloud our letters so we could see body language. Some of us wrote the letters and others typed them. The typed letters were more formal and polite, whereas the written letters were more emotional.

Fig. 2 Love letter image and video by Malayaka

Fig. 3 my hand written Breakup Letter

AEIOU 

I heard pigeons wake up at the sight of daylight, so I decided to go out at 7am to see for myself. I went out with a sketch book and AEIOU templates to record my observations of pigeons and compiled my findings with the rest of the group on Figma. 

Fig. 4 & 5 type up of our AEIOU experiences, mine being park and streets

Fig. 6 a video of some of my AEIOU observations

Synthesis & presentation

We visualised all our findings on a big sheet, printing of pictures, sketching and overlaying our research including AEIOU, love letters / break up letters and stats. Resulting in a clear picture  of our collective knowledge and ability to draw comparisons. 

Fig. 7 synthesis diagram of our findings. The red and blue lines show the comparison and contrast between each area.

Fig. 8, 9, 10 & 11 close ups of the synthesis document

From this we drew out four key concepts to explore further. We presented our findings to the group on Thursday 

Fig. 12 our four key concepts to explore in week 2

Fig. 913 Presentation of research

What I learnt

The love and breakup letters and AEIOU methods worked well. AEIOU gave insight into a user group (pigeons) that I couldn’t speak to. Whilst the letters highlighted our relationship with pigeons. Both key to the briefs objectives. 

Spending time researching, discussing, evaluating and visualising gave us a clear display of our findings to draw ideas from. Resulting in us focusing on ideas grounded in our research, creating a clear design process, which we received praise for in our presentation. 

Our visual representation of findings went down well in the presentation. However, it could have been better refined, so the audience didn’t require as much guidance. A table top exercise could have also been an effective way to explore the sheet.  

Finally, we felt we needed to pick one of our concepts. However, after feedback we realised we could draw in all our ideas to create one experience. Something we will explore next week. 

Week 2 Monday 6 November - Sunday 12 November 

Concept development 

Incorporating our original four concepts we narrowed down to one: Explore the impact of human hostile behaviour on pigeons.  

Fig. 14 mind map exploring our four concepts in more detail

From this we explored humans hostile actions towards pigeons. We role-played assigning users ‘pigeon’ or ‘human' roles. However, this was complex and difficult to execute well. It also felt ambiguous and subjective trying to perceive a pigeons perspective.   

Fig. 15 mind map of human behaviours that are bad for pigeons

Fig. 16 readings we came across about humans negative impact on pigeons

Prototyping 

We wanted to create an experience demonstrating humans behaviour to pigeons. We used cardboard cones and silver paint to create ‘spikes’ these looked harmful but were not. Similar to the blunt spikes that displaced pigeons. 

We also, made sticky sheets to represent anti-bird gels. The looks of these gels cause pigeons to avoid them, whilst the stickiness harms their feathers so they don’t return.  

For our digital aspect we explored sound. I included sounds that deterred pigeons e.g. humans shooing and hawks (a predator to pigeons) squawking. I also included pigeons cooing and fluttering wings. To showcase the juxtaposition of our feelings about pigeons in our love and breakup letters. I split the audio out into three segments to create an immersive sounds. 

Click below to hear audio the audio:

Click here

Initially we wanted the experience to include the whole room however, from prototyping we realised this would be too expansive, so we scaled down to a bench, an object found in our AIEOU research

Fig. 17 images of claw hands, cones, sticky sheets and chair concept

Concept revisit 

We revisited our concept to reconfirm our why, framing our statement into a question:  

“How can we represent the impact of human hostile behaviour on pigeons in an embodied experience?”

We realised the emphasis on impact was not our significant finding. It’s obvious these measures harm pigeons. However, we found they have had little impact on pigeons overall population which has grown by 153% since 1967 (British trust for Ornithology (2022). What is significant is humans continue to use these abusive measures despite there ineffectiveness. This was the message we wanted to portray. 

We finalised our prototype and tested it with a few users before presenting back on Thursday. 

Fig. 18 users testing our experience

Fig 19. image of our final experience. The pink and red cones held the phones and create a sensation of surround sound audio

Fig. 20 & 21 posters that were placed on the bench

What I learnt 

It wasn't clear if we were taking a human or pigeon perspective this caused confusion for users and weakened the experience. In our presentation Tyler Fox suggested giving users the tools to build their own anti-pigeon bench. I liked this idea of user becomes the designer, it may have helped with perspective. 

Secondly, exploring materials and environments is important in designing an experience. E.g. if we used a real bench this may have helped the experience feel more embodied. 

In future iterations, id like to go beyond the hostile pigeon measures and explore creating city spaces that don’t require them, a reflection on Beatley biophilic cities. 

References

Biophilic Cities. (n.d.). Our Vision Connecting Cities to Nature. https://www.biophiliccities.org/our-vision (Accessed 10/01/2023)

British trust for Ornithology (2022) Breading bird Survey. Available at: https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/breeding-bird-survey/latest-results/maps-population-density-and-trends (Accessed: 10/01/2024).