For my Computer Supported Collaborative Work class, I’ve been studying photography groups and how they work together. I studied a local photography group, PhoSo, in order to better understand what problems photography groups might have. For this project I was able to study PhoSo on two separate occasions. During the first occasion, the group meet outside to learn about and teach some light painting and night photography skills. In total 11 people attended this session and the session lasted approximately 2 hours. During the second session, the group meet inside in a classroom on the IU campus. In total 9 people attended this session and it lasted approximately 1.5 hours. During these studies I observed people’s behavior, group interaction, collaboration, teaching, and learning from each other. For both studies I actively participated in the groups sessions. As being a photographer myself, I was able to both teach other members, learn from other members, and share my photographs and knowledge.
Key Insights
Different cameras require much different skills
Lots of different cameras make teaching/learning harder for everyone
Leaders are important but not seen as the only teachers
Sharing with others encourages learning/teaching
Collaboration leads to quicker learning
No real personal photographic space -> all space is equally shared
Negativity is discouraged
From these insights, I brainstormed many concepts. After much sketching, idea generation, and iteration, I chose one concept to move forward.
Group View
Group View is a design for an iPad application. The purpose of this application is to enable teaching and learning in photography groups. It deals with groups of photographers who are collocated in some space/place. As photography groups meet in many different places, this allows them mobility to take their ‘place of meeting’ nearly anywhere.
Group View allows individuals or groups of individuals to connect to cameras withina certain range. Once paired up with the surrounding cameras, the application allowsfor viewing each cameras’ ‘live view’ and corresponding information (histogram, camerasettings, etc). Furthermore, with simple physical interactions (swiping, etc) manipulationof the images (stored locally) can be accomplished on-the-fly in order to better teach andexperiment.
The next step in my process is to build a prototype of Group View. From there I will do a user study on the application to understand a number of objectives. To read more details, download a PDF containing detailed information about the entire process thus far.
