Descriptive Template
The Descriptive Template defined at a top-level the areas that designers need to think about, in no particular order of priority, but all needed to be covered at some point:
Activity
What your body does; e.g. ‘you walk around there’
Place
Where does it happen; e.g. ‘in Queen Square’
Equipment
The visible equipment e.g. headphones, backpack and ‘the small screen that you hold’
Content
What is it about? e.g. ‘personal stories’
Media mode
For example sound, still images, video etc.
Genre
For example: history, drama, documentary; ‘the real sounds that happened in that place’
Affect
How does it make you feel? ‘special “Magic Moments”, ‘a bit spooky/scary’, ‘like eavesdropping’
Sociality
Is this something you do on your own or with other people?
Skills
Do you need any special abilities to do it ? ‘It’s simple to use, easy to learn how to make it work’
Time
When will it happen? Does it have to be at a specific time/day/date/season?
Does it only happen once, like an event, or is it an ongoing experience that people can dip in and out of?
Considering each of these areas of the Descriptive Template would throw up a variety of questions that relate to the Design Dimensions that we defined, but cannot all be directly mapped onto them.There are complex relationships between the template areas and the dimensions, that become evident when attempting to apply the dimensions to a project; each decision taken having a myriad of possible effects on other areas.
One area of the descriptive template that is easy to connect to the dimensions is that of sociality, where two dimensions identified are private/public and solitary/shared. You could also argue that affect maps on to dimensions related to immersion, but affect could also have a relationship to the location, existing elements of the built environment, the type of media used, and the content of the ‘story’ of the experience.