In the final stage of the Unit3 project, I shared my project outcomes with some audiences outside the GCD community, hoping to find the flaws of my current project and the directions for future development from them. In the selection of the audience, I divided them into two parts. I tried to invite friends with an art/design background and my parents – because they have a background in Chinese culture but are not familiar with design research. I chose these two types of audiences because this project explores the relationship between writing tools and hand postures. For friends with an art background, they might consider the clarity of the message conveyed by the project while viewing it, and also pay more attention to whether the design modules are effective. As for my parents, they mainly help me understand whether my project can be understood through design means alone without language description. The entire project is mainly analyzed in the form of a publication. The audience first browses the content of the entire publication and observes the different hand postures recorded in it. There is also a small part of interactive links – the audience needs to guess the corresponding writing tool based on the hand postures I provided. The main purpose of this interactive process is to hope that they can observe the subtle differences between different hand postures more carefully before truly reading the project explanation, thereby forming their own understanding of this part of the hand postures and writing tools, and also laying a foundation for the subsequent content, ultimately helping them to understand the research content of the project more deeply. When discussing their views on this project with these audiences, I discovered several very interesting differences and some interesting suggestions. First, I found that audiences with different backgrounds have different ways of understanding. For audiences with an art background, the questions they raised and the discussions they had with me were more about the success of the visual system and some suggestions on the structure and binding method of the entire publication. However, for my parents, because they have not received systematic art training, they talked more about the gestures themselves and some memories of gestures and writing tools in their minds. Secondly, I found that I had underestimated the importance of the guessing game module to my project. My friends told me that when they first previewed the publication as a whole, they thought it was just a project about gestures and tools as the main content. However, the addition of the interactive module made them realize that the change of writing tools affected the gestures, and there were certain patterns in the influence of tool iterations in different periods on gestures. This made them have a clearer understanding when they saw the subsequent content and the final scientific analysis of gestures. In addition, some viewers initially interpreted the work as a cultural archive of traditional tools, which revealed how strongly audiences associate such objects with heritage rather than bodily techniques. Based on these feedbacks I received, I believe that this project can be further developed in the future by enhancing interactivity and experience. For example, in future versions, we can invite audiences to share their own familiar writing gestures or unique writing tools, thereby forming a broader archive of body writing practices. At the same time, the research can also be extended to more diverse writing tools, comparing writing techniques and gestures in different cultures. Even this can be used as a starting point to consider how future writing recording gestures will be negotiated and established. These development directions can enable the project not only to remain at the level of recording but also to become a more participatory study, exploring how writing technologies have shaped human body movements in the course of historical development.
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