Week 6: Concept Bombs and discussions

This week we did concept bombs in class. This was to get a crash course in how to really tie in the object/behaviour/scenario together, and to give us some starting ideas for our final design.

This is just an example of some of the concept bombs (Will's and mine).
We then sat down and looked at them all (Ann-Maree, Will and I did- Felicity missed this class). We first went through deciding which ones were even a reality and then picked our favourite from each set of three induvidal.

We looked at Will's first one (the watch), my ATM bank card data collecter/ATM locator and Ann-Maree's app for older members of the family.
Will's was the one we focused on most because we still had The Fun Theory in our heads.
We really wanted to stick to this as we recognised it as being very effective partnered up with interaction design. And since interaction design seemed to be fun in so many of the designs we had researched, we wanted to this to be our team's philosophy and identity.
Will's watch design was basically a GPS that showed you what your heart desired and the direction it was in (like that compass in Pirates od the Carribean). You programmed in your favourite things to do, things to eat, things to see, interests etc and as you were out and about in the city or in suburbs you hadn't been before it would show you the direction of places you might enjoy. The scenario in which you would use it however, is a day out in which you had no plans and didnt mind going to surprise locations as dictated by this watch. The data collection was tracking and logging the places of interest to you that you pass without you realising.

We thought this could be something to look at for The Fun Theory. We thought it could be adapted into some sort of game... like a trail of breadcrumbs type of device/community. So you could log in a place you want your friend to check out and your watch would lead you there, then you could leave a place for THAT friend to check out. You could complete little missions (take a picture of a statue along the way and upload) and have an online community and game system for the public.

One thing we really kept going back to is that for The Fun Theory to work, it really needed to be in a public environment. It needed to be an accidental discovery, something that people stumbled into and it diverted their bad habits into positive ones subtly. In a home environment people would have to buy it themselves and once used a few times it would cease to have the same effect. The Fun Theory was more about a wake up call than a constant everyday installation. It make you go "oh hang on, i don;t recycle... maybe i shuld continue to do this rom now on" or "oh man that wasn't hard,, maybe i should just take the stairs from now on, i'll lose some weight this wasy".

We went away thinking about this for consideration in our final design concepts.

Week 5: Object-Behaviour-Scenario

We got an introduction to the whole basis of this project-
Obkect
behaviour
Scenario

To design for interaction we need to identify the behaviour of a product and the whole system that they immerse themselves in (or the context that the object lives in).

There are many different interactions (or simple put, the inputs/outputs we identified earlier in the semester) and there are many different users meaning that one interaction may not make sense to another user. For example, an elderly person and a gen Y grew up in completely different generations and as a result of this, may naturally interact with things differently. A gen Y may intereact with a mobile phone differently to an elderly person so their learnt/taught knowledge on common things may be different.

So we need to identity our user, learn about them and the interactions useful to them, then design accordingly with this knowledge.


The three parts of O/B/S are as follows:

Object:
The tangible aspect of the product. The Form, the aesthetics, the ergonomics. The materials and techniques and the mechanisms and the components.

Scenario:
The scenario links PEOPLE>EVENTS>PLACES. We communicate the scenario with narratives: videos, storyboards etc.
The narrative demontrates the user benefit and the alternative futures.

Behaviour:
It's products as extensions of people's senses. It involves the logocal understanding of peoples behaviours and object behaviours. Defines input and output mechanisms.


This is the basic knowledge we need to keep in mind and know for our interaction design. We have to take our interaction learning about the inputs and outputs and bring it firther to create out complete, workable design.

Week five, interaction designers- they say things

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqQ03DayHI

Week five, Presentation day!

Stolen from Marianella's email, here are everyone's designs!
Some of the idea's were great,
I really liked the alarm clock one because of the lighting psyphology aspect. I'm not sure they meant to deliberately make it with that in mind because when i asked they didn't seem too sure what I was saying (perhaps that was my explaining whilst being so tired) but it was beautiful modelling at least, I thought.
I course the people sensor that looked like a heart rate was beautifully constructed- the affect of the acrylic over the led's was lovely.
The chocolate temering would be of great use in a busy kitcen somewhere fancy like the Hilton... I can see specialised places actually buying them up.
The push to talk button was very well constructed too, so solid and the pushing down action with the foam was so smooth.
The punching bag at the traffic lights was great! close to our theory so I appreciated their design. Glad we didn't do crossing the road too.

And our group, I think we did well guys! We (mostly Will) pulled off programming for the first time! Proud of us :)

Phase two: we're now beginning to think about using our new skills in application to sensing the news....

Week four, trolley game

Sorry for the tilting of the head that's needed to view these. These are some images of our concept to show what it would be like if it wasn't a mock up rough model

Week four, model constructing and prep for presentation

As Will took care of the mammoth task of the programming, Ann-Maree, Felicity and I took care of prepping for the presentation. We made signs, helped find links to things and helped to refine everything down perfectly.
Once we'd all built the model and finished the coding we tested it out at home and it worked beautifully!
We attatched push buttons with casings to the sides and front of a chair and mounted the Arduino on the seat of the chair:

After the testing, we took it to the local coles to give it a real life set up and try it in context. While being a tad fragile, it worked well and we definitely had fun doing it which means our fun theory is in place right?

People who passed by seemed to be intrigued and amused which is a good indication that this thing could actually work I think, althought of course some people seemed to just hate life and want nothing to do with it but thats people.

From the footage we took while doing the context set up, we made two small films to upload onto out google docs as backup for the presentation.

Week four, counter

http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-7-segment-countdown-timer/

This is a tutorial on how to program a counter.

We tried and tried and in the end couldn't quite figure out how to make it work. There is a significant amount of coding completed in relation to this but it's just not fully nutted out.
Will is going to add the coding to our google docs.

We realised though, that the design makes perfect sense without the counter. We simply lost an element of complexity which we would have liked to have kept in

Week four

After a long day.

Week four, excursion

On the Ekka wednesday holiday, we spent the day programming and constructing for our model.
Will and I went on an excursion to JayCar and bought wire and push buttons. And a souldering iron.
We got openly called nerds on the way back from there by a stranger, so it was a successful mission.

 We built little casings around the push buttons and did some research into the coding and how to do it all. We confirmed all the inputs/outputs and planned out our plan of attack

Week four, development of trolley game

As we discussed, we began to suddenly develop our idea into a tangible thing.
We decided to go with a game like the buzzer game:

Basically the idea would be to push the trolley down the aisle without hitting the sides or the buzzer would go off. And once you hit home a victory tune would sound.
We further developed to include a counter that recorded the number or hits and depending on how well you did, you could win deals for shops in the shopping center you were just at. Hit only once and get 10% off at donut king, that sort of thing. But that was more New Product Development thinking as it was almost a business model so we decided to not include any of that in the physical mock up we were planning.

So we identified:
Input= hit the side bars
output= buzzer noise
second output= red LED lights up
third output= counter goes up by one each time there is a hit

input= dont hit the side bars
output= blue LED constant

input= hit the end
output= victory tune
second output=green LED lights up
third output= Counter resets after a 5 second waiting period

We collected all the bits and pieces from Yasu and talked it through with him.
He suggested that instead of putting a pressure pad along the whole side bar, just for the demonstration we could put push buttons on the sides and front of the trolley itself  to simulate the same inputs and outputs, but to keep the amount of coding and materials to a minimum.

Week four, BREAKTHROUGH- The Fun Theory

HALLELUJAH!
We've had a breakthrough!

In class today everything just came together.
We were just finishing off the last tutorial for Arduino (or more correctly Will did as he has taken charge of Arduino seeing as he has taken it home the most and has the best grasp on it so far) and we were again, going around in circles unable to think of anything inspiring at all.

We had researched a eliminated wuite alot of stuff together and suddenly Ann-Maree remembered a video that Charlie showed us last year sometime of the 'world's deepest bin'  ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbEKAwCoCKw ), a video which was part of something called 'The Fun Theory', an initiative by Volkswagon.

http://www.thefuntheory.com/

The Fun Theory is that through fun interactive design, you can change people's behaviours and attitudes for the better. You will see examples here in these images of encouraging people not to speed, encouraging them to recycle, to throw their rubnish away, to take the stairs instead of the excalator,and to buckle up in the car.
The key word in all of this is encourage. It's no strict nazi-esque enforcing of rules that make you want to rebel, it's a gentle fun encouraging suggestion to do the right thing... and they can be such simple games but they seem to evoke such a beautiful childlike delight that these chores are now fun and enjoyable.

This just sang out to us so intensely we felt we couldn't ignore it. So we emplyed the fun theory into our designign and suddenly we had a million ideas!
Such as, encouraging people to:

• walk at the lights and not jay walk
• Put their trolleys away at coles/woolies etc
• stand on the right side of the escalator (escalator ettiquite)
• turn their tv off at the wall
• turn all lights off in the house that aren't needed
• alway buy a ticket and not scam their way onto a bus
• gum in the BIN and not on the ground of under a table

etc etc etc. There were so many more but we wanted to do the jay walking one.
So we were thinking about light up hopscotch, or interactive soccer, or something fun but after talks with Marianella, we were informed that another group were doing a crossing the lights thing so we decided to go for something completely different. This is when we decided on the trolley scenario as we thought you could make a game out of physically pushing the trolleys home at the trolley bays.

Week four, getting close with inspiration

We were looking through a website (not academic by any means, more of a meme site) called http://first-world-problems.com/in class at the very beginning, desperate for inspiration.

This lead us to a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXCsRlpbqPM
This showed 100 first world problems really fast and quite a few of them were actually scenarios we could fix with a Arduino design!
Food for thought

Week three, simple model making

http://www.instructables.com/id/Speaker-Creature/

This was an awesome find of Ann-Maree's. It shows a little creation that we could actually construct very simply using materials we have. It makes sense and it's very simple... also it's a look into product hacking

Week three, product hacking- instructables.com

http://www.instructables.com/id/Stolmen-and-Ekby-compression-bookshelf-system/

We've been taking a look at hacked products. Like hacked physical products. People have been modifying products to be more technological or have a new or different feature by deconstructing and constructing with the help of programming and Arduino! It's pretty ingenious stuff and it seems like this will really be something we'll be dealing with shortly. Or at least it's good to have on our knowledge base as it may help hugely with prototyping. Once I learn some of this prgramming properly I'd love to have a go playing around with product hacking.

Week three, coding lessons

http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/lesson2.html


Here is a lesson on how to understand coding. We've been trying to all learn so we can all help Will with the coding, since he has taken over programming duties as he understands it better than us and he's had more time to play around with the board

Week three, User Experience Design in the Google Era

User Experience Design in the Google Era

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbToDF1M7j0&feature=related

NavigationArts' Director of Information Architecture, Kelley McDonald, discusses how to engage site visitors through effective site structure and relevant content.

 This goes back to the first reading... i think what he is talking about in the video relates to map navigating. Creating nodes and clear pathways and allowing people to easily craft their own path through the website. \
And of course good old 'user experience'. Really this is something that will always be talked about and is always important. If it is confusing you will not enjoy using it. Simple.

Week three, cute little robot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&NR=1&v=HuC6q9kbryw

This was found by William Cilento and it's just a little morphing robot who can scuttle around. Doesn't really prove much but it's cool in the sense that this is something we could create using this Arduino business.

It kind of shows the amount of personality and life you can insert into a product with with some interaction design and programming. It's interesting the personality an inanimate object can take on, and how we can grow to see it as alive even though we know better- seriously watch the video, how cute is it!

Week three, programming has a place in art

http://vimeo.com/16558492

One Hundred and Eight is an interactive wall-mounted Installation mainly made out of ordinary garbage bags. Controlled by a microcontroller each of them is selectively inflated and deflated in turn by two cooling fans.

Although each plastic bag is mounted stationary the sequences of inflation and deflation create the impression of lively and moving creatures which waft slowly around like a shoal. But as soon a viewer comes close it instantly reacts by drawing back and tentatively following the movements of the observer. As long as he remains in a certain area in front of the installation it dynamically reacts to the viewers motion. As soon it does no longer detect someone close it reorganizes itself after a while and gently restarts wobbling around.



There seems to be many art installations and sculptures that harness the bauty and magic that programming can create. Simple things like motion sensors which set of fans can just bring a piece of art to life in such a special way....

Week three, interaction design concepts video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2OJCFDoXNQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

This is a video of some pretty cool interaction design ideas. They're all pretty funny and personable, the pet chair is cute.

Except that milk bottle of light is back again.

Week three, group update

So we came to class this week and got nice and confused all over again.

After some discussions with Marianella and Yasu we discovered that the parts of the objects we pulled apart were NOT what we had to use for the week 5 presentation. I feel we wasted alot of time trying to make something out of the pieces we had and got bogged down.

After the confusion was cleared up, we started to look at sites that told us how to construct a simple design using arduino.

http://hacknmod.com/hack/top-40-arduino-projects-of-the-web/

This website told us all the materials needed to construct certain simple products. Through research on websites like this, (and alot of time spent on the Arduino website discovering different coding etc http://arduino.cc/playground/projects/ideas )   we began to understand the complexity of certain inputs/outputs and what was within our grasp programming wise for our week 5 project.

We went around in circles trying to think of a design or a scenario to design for but as we were only just starting to grasp the whole concept of everything involved.

Honestly we have had a very slow start to all of this, it's a very steep learning curve and we're hoping to have a breakthrough soon.

Week three, pointless interaction design

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTmge7-yWOo&feature=related

This seems pretty damn pointless but another example of interaction design. Pouring light seems like a rather beautiful concept... but yeah i wouldn't want that in my home.
Well i guess i would but come on, what on earch are you going to do with only a few minutes of soft light in a bottle? Not much... unless like the guy in the video you want a tv watching companion.

Week two, a stunning interaction design...

http://vimeo.com/47095462

The "Water Light Graffiti" is a surface made of thousands of LED illuminated by the contact of water. You can use a paintbrush, a water atomizer, your fingers or anything damp to sketch a brightness message or just to draw. Water Light Graffiti is a wall for ephemeral messages in the urban space without deterioration. A wall to communicate and share magically in the city.


This is beyond amazing. It's actually similar to a luminaire design i am working on in relation to touch activated light and sound for use in therapy. I'm so excited to see that this is something that is a definite reality and this could be programmed using arduino... although it would be beyond difficult.

As far as interaction design goes this is stunning. The utter joy of using this, and the magical ethereal quality is just... wow. I really wanted to be there playing with this awesome toy....

Week two, Designing Kinetic Interactions for Organic User Interfaces

This reading is about the infancy, yet relavance of kinetic interaction interfaces.
The advantages of having a virtual world or interaction (like virtual reality) would mean that you could interact in a natural, human way instead of expressing yourself through a button or a mouse. A natural gesture, or unconcious response would mean a much more natural, accidental/unconcious (in a beneficial way) response or 'output' would come from your interaction.

It also talks about the importance of movement.
We use movement as a way of percieving an object as 'alive' and feeling emotionally connected to it. We as human being have and always have had an obsession with movement. Natural movement, artificial movement, self movement etc.

"These examples from early automata to kinetic art to social robotic creatures demonstrate how reactive kinetic motion designed to be mimetic of a living organism has the power to engage us, fascinate us and create an interactive conversation with an otherwise disembodied object. It is our innate ability as human beings to be engaged by the lifelike qualities of motion, allowing us to employ the movement of objects as a tool for communication and engagement, and allowing inanimate objects to become partners in our interactions"

The movement they may give a product is based on human movement and it allows the user to have a social interaction with the product.

I like this because if an object appears cute and personable then you'll want to play with it more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPdP1jBfxzo
This video is something i saw years ago just because of the song but it's just sort of clicked in that this is what the reading is talking about. Cute.

Week two, an interaction technology

http://mashable.com/2012/08/11/smart-surgeon-gloves/
Hamish showed us this link which i thought was amazing.
With the ability or make silicone chips into a soft malleable material, it opens up the possibilities of doing things the the precise touch of a fingertip. An example here, being surgeons gloves. Almost the ultimate interaction design as the interaction IS you i guess?

Fascinating opportunities with this....

Week two, looking into interaction design

http://vimeo.com/44660797

This video is amazing.
It shows a set of speakers that you interact with by stroking the fabric which covers the speaker. It just simply looks like a beautiful enjoyable way of interacting with the product, even though you could just as easity use buttons (MORE easily use button in fact, as they are familiar and a known way of operating such an object). But i think this is cool none the less.
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/44660797" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

Week two, a further understanding of what is meant by news

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/how-people-consume-political-news--in-one-chart/2012/07/25/gJQAqnRt8W_blog.html

(to see a clearer version click on this link: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/ZIooyTJA1IgzGil9ZopNj9XBhCvAmbga8jgF-DpcuMM5DS3e5fD8b8n-t2RzSJmsgGeti3gEEM1NhBio9j8Qp7178ai7BvM3HQqc-23CgnpodwfSNsY

This shows how we physically consume news. Which products and designs we use to access news.

This is talking about news as in world and local current affairs, but i am also becoming aware that the news really can just refer to feedback. As in you can send a weather balloon up into the atmosphere and record the tempurature every ten meters. This is news. Feedback of information in whatever form seems to be what is meant by news for this assignment

Week two, what is interaction design? Further research

http://thefactoryfactory.com/wordpress/?p=823

This article had a good diagram attatched that really sums up my confusion around 'What is interaction design?'


It seems to be, (like how industrial design honestly seems to be too) a mix of so many different fields. It's programming, it's behaviour, it's graphic design, it's industrial design. It's all connected because it's really dealing with PEOPLE. You cannot take one field and say that alone you can figure out a person and how to design for them, it's a wide variety of knowledge and research that needs to be found and understood before you can hope to create something that will be GOOD design.