The interactive website and some inital website responses that I presented were mostly confusing in a sense that the question posed on the website is too broad for the user to capture their response/express themselves with a very constraining system of pre-formed shapes. In order to be able to collect valuable information/knowledge from the participatory website I would have to focus the question to generate very targeted answers.
The outcomes were very much based around the fact that there were face features included in the selection of shapes which resulted in people constructing faces. Because the features were too prominent and less abstract in comparison to the other shapes it was suggested to take the face features out. Including them already suggested the user to build a face although the face features were just added in case there was a need to create a face.
Also, the constraint of just having a couple of generic shapes, without being able to rotate them or change the size, to answer such a broad question left some people frustrated. There was an interesting point said about the frustration of not being able to capture your thoughts with this system to descibe the term „identity“ and how that says a lot about identity itself – how it can’t be just answered through this one-dimensional and very restrained channel. But that identity is a complex subject that can’t be pinned down very easily.
Suggestions were mainly about the usability of the website in terms of adding more constraints, making it more frustrating or making several websites with different kinds of constraints. And as already said the research question has to be more focused, so the user can be more clear with their answer.