Shaoting Yin

Shaoting Yin is a Chinese industrial and experience designer currently enrolled in the Product Design MA programme at the Royal College of Art. As a professional industrial designer, he has worked for the kitchen and bathroom products company and the health products company, which helped him master a good design thinking pattern and engineer techniques. His design strongly focuses on human experience, people-oriented is his design code. In the RCA, he had explored a wide range of areas, like critical design, consumer electronics, psychological aspects, sustainability and service design.

Exhibitions&Award

RCA 2021, Royal College of Art, London, 2021

Work In Progress Online Show, Royal College of Art, London, 2021

"Subgaze" published by LS:N Global -The Future Laboratory, 2021

"Back to the office," my recent work explores the complex office dynamic and politics and exposes them through a board game with strategies and tactics. It challenges people's cognition of the ideal interpersonal communication mode in a playful and ironic way, and helps people to reorient into those nuanced social dynamics.

My work focuses more on the emotion of people and explores the application of sociology and psychology in product design.In my recent project, I tried to use design strategy to unpack the subtle relationships in interpersonal cooperation and provide a new perspective to the audience.

He thinks that a good design experience should not only be driven by function, but by emotion. And designers should explore the humanistic value behind products. He also values the influence of policy, culture and technology on people's behavior patterns, and actively establishes potential experience patterns.In addition to the traditional business design, he also involves the background of literature and psychology, which promotes him to establish his own thinking system in the RCA with a more macro and open attitude.

Back to the office — A balance board social game with different weight pieces, which simulates different office social factors through game tactics.

Game mechanism video — A general introduction to the game mechanism and the whole process of the game.

Instruction paper — The visual instruction about game mechanism and the pieces.

Game Tactics — The combination of different weight pieces and regions can promote different tactics.

Tactic one — When you place large pieces, you should be very careful not to put them on the periphery.

Tactic two — The outcome is sometimes hard to be predicted.

Tactic three — When taking pieces to score, don't be greedy to take heavy pieces with high score directly, but analyze the balance first.

Tactic four — Pay attention to your opponent's trap, don't go to this step.

"Back to the office" is a balance board social game with physical and remote mixed interaction. It focuses on the context of people returning to the office, a complex interpersonal place, from telecommuting alone. Through this dark and playful game, it breaks people's imagination of idealized social activities and helps people to reorient into the real and complex world with office dynamics, politics and culture.

Unlike the traditional team building games, it exposes some subtle aspects of the office. It's an antidote to the saccharin games. When we go back to the office, not only the space, but the cultural and power structure. For example, territorial behaviour like fighting for the best place, competing agenda, even conflict. This ironic game reveals those micro aggressions through strategies and tactics. It's fun, but also a little bit darker.

In this game, the process includes rolling the dice for different areas, placing pieces with different weights and collecting pieces to calculate the total score. Through strategy and tactics, you can get to know your colleagues from a new perspective. It can test the tacit understanding and trust between each other, and even reveal who is the person who always destroys the game. At the same time, office staff can have informal conversations with colleagues during a short break, and get the office environment of camaraderie with one serious game under the delightful atmosphere.

Medium:

Wood sheet, Acrylic board, SLA

Game strategy evolution — I started from the purely cooperation strategy of two axis maze game, and then developed to the dexterity board game with competition and conflict elements.

Two axis maze game — Two people can feel the force imposed by each other through the rotation axis while playing the game collaboratively. But the dependence on partners makes it boring.

Dexterity board game — The exterity board game evolution. Its strategies and tactics form the concept about social dynamics.

The mix of physical and remote interactions — Physical players and remote players can form a team to participate in a game. Their roles in the team are different. Remote players can judge the piece area more accurately through software, and physical players are responsible for operation and balance. The process of the game can lead to different negotiations among the colleagues.

The mix of physical and remote interactions — The working Unity game and technical drawings of electronic components for physical games.

Medium:

Unity, Adafruit circuit, Force sensor, Arduino Uno, EL Tape

Shaoting Yin

Medium:

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Social

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Royal College of Art