Contact & Workshop

In this week, we participated in our allocated contact and due to the Good Friday holiday, I attended the Thursday’s workshop session. During Tuesday’s contact session, we first had an administrivia and then each individual done the ‘report-back’ session by sharing their opinions and answering some questions listed by on the slides.

Report-back:

Plans for Easter break (even if not course related)

They are more about the concept generating and refinement, and the prototype planning. Based on the feedback we received, our team have changed our problem space, initial concept, so in the new problem space, I’m going to explore technologies and resources can be used for individual project, conduct desk research and user research. After that, I can analyse the data I collected and create the conceptual model of the finalised concept for prototyping.

Top achievement for last week

Specified our new problem space, which is “breathing for a better life”, which aims to enable users to acquire different breathing techniques through some playful and intuitive exercise visualisation ways to meet their varied personal needs, such as relieving stress, doing sports, sing songs, and curing respiratory diseases. Apart from that, I done some research around the existing systems in the domain, like waking up and guided meditation, some apps Alison recommended to us, read some health-related articles to get a better understanding of different breathing methods, like chest breathing, belly breathing, lion’s breathing, etc.

Aside from the report what have/will you be working on?

Apart from the report, I will start working on getting familiar with the Arduino toolkit and some other useful technologies in Arduino family, so as to choose the appropriate materials to build my prototype. And integrating resources and data to finalise my individual concept.

Any concerns, ongoing or new?

There are a lot of different sensors or some electronic materials around Arduino, so it will be a little bit time-consuming for me get to know each of them. But actually, I think it’s worth exploring to take a look at them, and if I have any issues for choosing sensors, etc., I will just send emails or post to the slack channel.

Apart from that, we also conducted some activities around exploring the discovery methods. First, we carried out an observation exercise, most people in zoom meeting found some videos to do a quick observation and summarised the insights we gathered from that.

After that, we explored more methods from the shared document. Here are the methods I chosen, and the advantages of drawing on these methods:

Doing online interviews:

• Seeking clarification and get some responses in real-time

• Checking whether my ideas align with the participants’ ones

• Pre-preparing some interview questions and allowing some news questions to be brought up to the process as a react to their responses

Online discussion platforms:

• Organising discussion and gathering feedback from a group of people remotely

• Each participant can contribute to the discussion by reacting on others’ opinions

• Collecting various data from people with different backgrounds

• Pre-preparing discussion topics and some elicitation questions to stimulate each participant to talk

Using Google form for data collection:

•Gathering the quantitative data

•Reaching a wider range of participants easier

Big Brother Style Observations:

• Gathering the quantitative data

• Reaching a wider range of participants easier

Mobile probes:

• Accessing a wide range of participants easier

• Gathering both qualitative and quantitative data

On Tuesday’s workshop, Ben and Steven gave us some tutorials about Arduino. From introducing the Arduino, the advantages for using that, to materials we need when we try to build our project. They give some explanation about components in our toolkits, like the breadboard, resistors, servos, jump wires, motors, battery snaps (including what are the Arduino libraries, examples). Also, they guided us to go through some Arduino activities, so that we can have a basic understanding on how to start creating some gadgets by using the beginner toolkit.

They also taught us how to read the wiring diagram provided by some online tutorials, and I have to say it is very helpful because we will read some wiring diagrams online when we start prototyping. In addition, they shared some websites that we can use for purchasing some electronic materials, like Jaycay.com.

Individual process:

In this week, I mainly focus on exploring the Arduino toolkit, so as to get some ideas about how to get started on my individual project. There are some useful materials I may able to draw on, like the Light dependent sensors. In order to build my prototype, I may also need to buy some motion sensors online. My initial idea is to use some sensors to detect the movement of the user's abdomen and chest, and then based on these parameters to give them feedback, so as to guide them to practice abdominal breathing technique in a correct way.

Improvement

1. Compressing the image file size for better display in journal post.
2. Adding the alt text description of each image

This Weeks Inspirations

I came across these modular hexagon lights which can be installed in the home.

https://heliostouch.com/

I found them inspiring as I wanted to draw on the main feature behind it and try and apply it to my Energy Saving Emily prototype. The main feature of the heliotouch is the lights and the touch feature. Users have the ability to touch and change the lighting patterns instantly.

I want to utitlize the touch feature and make that part of Emily. So if a user is not being energy efficient they have to touch the hexagon panel to turn off the annoying features that is alarming.

Report Back

On this week's contact session, we report back our progress of our current idea. As for me, because in our group, we separate our group project to individual project, so I just mentioned about my individual ideas and my next plan for my new idea. My new idea will focus on how to guide the children to learn the programming, and I want to combine the coding learning with a manual or user book, which is inspired by the coding game Shenzhen I/O. I also mentioned my progress of learning Arduino.

Methods for discovery

The other activity we did is to fill a Miro board to define our concept thoroughly, by making the tree diagram, we can make sure we all agree on every details of our concept. In this chart, we explored our concept from two aspects : The Thing and The Context. The thing mainly focus on the form and function and the context mainly focus on the target audience, time and place.

Arduino Tutorial

On Thursday, Ben and Steven taught us a lot about Arduino via zoom. Although I used the Arduino before, but to be honest, I still confused about how to link the circuit and interact with other software. I will keep learning on it and try to find out how to achieve the main function of my concept.

Bonjour,

During the contact session, we got to experience "Pandemic Testing". COVID-19 is rampant and people are stuck inside their homes. So what does this mean for design - unfortunately, the ordinary testing methods have become void. How do we test now while under quarantine and restrictions?, this is what we explored this week in our contact class. In the contact exercise we observed at person on train without actually being on a train (whatttttt). While tasked, I opted to search for videos on youtube while some chose to see this in magazines. It was fascinating to understand how we can test while home, though not being the same it did fulfil our purpose of gaining insights. Below are my insights collected -

In second part of exercise, we were also asked to research for other methods that can also be used in quarantine and below are what I found. Personally, I think online discussions forms are an excellent source of gathering info, which I could even use for testing my individual direction in project.

Break -

My plan for the break (except for watching movies all day) is to complete the Arduino tutorial. Currently I'm on Activity 3 and since I have good understanding of Arduino, I don't think it would be difficult. Over the break, I also intend to complete the interactions for my individual direction. Except for that, I wish everyone Happy Easter.

Adios Amigos

Week 5

I had a rough week 5 because my accommodation kicked everyone out due to rising cases in COVID-19 in Queensland and for safety because of which I couldn't attend either the Tuesday's session or the Friday's session. I had informed my team about this and was trying to keep my communications as quick as possible. My team had communicated with me and had decided that we will be proceeding with the Option-2 for our team concept and individual prototype building part.

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Week 6

This week, I had to finish the team part and the individual part of our proposal report. We had decided that I will be doing the problem space/concept part of the report. I had started researching more about global warming and its cause. I was trying to think about what are the different things that we can use or we can inform children about global warming. I found out stuff such as plastic contributes to greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of its lifecycle, from its production to its refining and the way it is disposed of. Meaning that it's not only bad for the ocean and environment, it also contributes to global warming.

After the team part, I worked on the individual part of the report. I read all the feedback again. Kasey had copied all the feedback and put it on our google drive which made things a lot easier.

As we hadn't finalised any input method, my plan for the break is to come up with a system of input, and output response. A system which should be interactive and fun for children. Although it is easier to come up with the output method from the globe of our concept, I will look into different sensors that can be used as well.

On the Tuesday of week 4, we had our group presentation on a topic which had to be novel, interactive, fun and physical. We had decided that we will be going with the topic of teaching people about global warming with an interactive device. I think live presentation in front of a classroom would have been a lot more fun because we were planning on having volunteers to come up and do a small demo of our concept. But, cause of restrictions we decided to make a video to explain our concept as demonstrating the concept online-live through a skit would have been very difficult.

We had divided into different tasks that everyone in the group will be researching about and preparing for the video. I particularly looked into explaining the problem space. I recorded my voice using my phone (which did not have the quality that I was expecting) and sent my part of the presentation with the recording to Kasey, who was editing the video together and had the rest of the voice over. Eddie had planned to do the skit for giving a demo of our concept with his housemates.

After our presentation, we received critique feedback from the class, all the teaching staff members on slack and via zoom.

After that, we talked to Alison and clay in a private zoom room on the things that we can improve and they helped with different ideas. The main aspects that we talked about were how to make the input more interactive and who will be our target audience.

Later in the week, we had a group meeting to discuss about the proposal-report. We also tried to discuss the various input methods that can be replaced in our original idea, but we failed to do so. Hence we decided to meet again on Sunday where everyone would bring in 2 ideas for 'ways of input' and bring in 2-3 research paper related to any aspect of our concept.

I had mostly researched global warming and sociology, and teaching children about global warming which I shared and summarised to our group. One of the input methods that I preferred that I thought of was having 2 garbage bins as the inputs. One for plastic and the other for biodegradable things only. Depending on how much each bin weighs, it will affect the globe accordingly. such as if the plastic garbage bin weighs more, then the earth will turn grey and brownish with sounds on cars honking, whereas if there is more biodegradable things or less plastic the globe turns green and blue with sounds of birds chirping and rivers flowing. But the only problem that we discussed with this way of input was that it was too binary, like before when we had received the feedback about our presentation.

Eddie came up with another Idea of input where we use a strip which can take our inputs via our finger. We will be able to glide across it to input.

But we still have to research more on the ways of inputting.

Later we also divided the sections of the individual report to make things easier.

Week - 3

After teams were formed in the world cafe session (I couldn't attend the sessions that week as I was ill and a bit paranoid about it being the COVID-19) I met my team later in the week which included Kasey, Eddie and Kaun. Our team meeting included a brainstorming session where we came up with different ideas for the problem space, technologies we can use, target audience, and different emotions that humans have. We also came up with solutions to the problem spaces that we discussed. We used colour post-it notes to divide our topics into different sections.

We also had another meeting on Sunday where our agenda was to finalise on a concept that we will be taking forward.

We decided on a problem space that relates to teaching people about global warming.

Tuesday

In the studio session we learned about how to conduct different types of fieldwork during a pandemic and how to use a Miro board.

Miro Board

This is what my team mate and I came up with. Additional information about our projects will be added in after we determine the details of our form.

Individual

My Project - Spud

Spud is a small robot that sits on the user's shoulder and uses its body language and facial expressions to show its sassy personality.

User Testing Ideas

From the background research I have done for the proposal, I got an idea of getting participants to show what body language they think is suitable for an emotion. Participants will be given a figurine/teddy bear to move its limbs to create body postures and paper cut outs of eyebrows to position it on its face to create different facial expressions.To find the best method of a shock factor, different methods of shocking participants will be used. For example, the Jack-in-the-box with springs, glowing red, showing teeth, etc.

All of these testing will be done with my housemates during the mid semester break so I can start building Spud as soon as possible.

Key achievement for this week

The major complement of this week is that we finished both team and individual proposal report for the project. During Tuesday’s studio session, we reported back as a team of what we’ve done for the last week and further plan for the upcoming mid-break. Also, in the workshop session on this Thursday, we officially got a hands on Arduino Kit.

Here's a little bit of reflection on the report writing progress. For my individual part, after I decided to go for the idea of focusing on smell-based interaction last weekend, I started to write the document. I wasn’t really satisfied with the project planning section, because to be honest I didn’t come up with a comprehensive prototype building plan at this stage.

As for the team-based part, I wouldn't say that a pleasant team collaborate experience. We are really disappointed and be tired of the absence of other team members. We could not gather the whole parts of the report until few hours until the deadline. And some team members didn't bother to read the whole report at all, that caused the consistency of the report became terrible. Now I'm a little bit glad that we've got the individual project instead the team one. Otherwise, the teamwork probably couldn't be carry on at all. So at this stage, I'm not hoping the get efficient support and backup from the team at all.

Methods for discovery

The first thing we did is to “conduct” an observation on trains. So I tried to bring all the memory back based on my last train riding experience. That was quite different from the observation we have done before actually, because it was based on my memory. But still it helps me to go through the methods to conduct a study. After my own part, I also got the chance to have a look at others observations result. The same setting on train has totally different contents and insights. After the exploration of different methods, I picked up three potential methods could be used for my individual project. Those are phone call interview after showing user the demonstration video; Informal cultural probes by asking the user to take pictures following the instruction; holding an online discussion/workshop by using Miro and other collaborate tools. Of course, it might not be that easy to get the data, feedback we would like to collect that easy. Therefore, me and my team will try to employ multiple methods by individuals to find out which is the most suitable method from our team-based project.

There are also some concerns come from the situation we are facing at the moment. Since our target user is primary school students, it would quite difficult to get access to them. It may require special advocacy/gatekeeper approval to observe and interview children in class. But we had the similar issue when doing the Introduction to Web design course. We were designing a website contains interactive educational context for children. Without the direct contact with actual children, we conducted methods with peers and other adults. It still works for most part of the user experience build and improve parts. However, there are still limitations and issues didn’t solved without field investigation.

As for my personal project, I decided to use online interview for the evaluation session. I’m consider to show the finalized prototype video to peers and friends(who might have access to the children), the asking them to do a short interview(might be either formal or informal) with me. The method of google forms we used to used for the Digital Prototyping course would not be consider as a formal research method for this project.

Breaking down a project

The other in-class activity we did in the class was trying to breakdown the massive project into small parts so that we could have a clearer idea of that we are going to do step by step. This mapping result definitely helps me to come up with the whole project plan for the next upcoming weeks. We started at the "Context of Use", which put more focus on the usage scenario of the concept. It involves three big aspects of location, people and time. However, it was a bit hard to finish the mapping by only two team members. We are really disappointed and tired by the absence of other team members.

The second one we tried to fill in and finish is the "Thing Itself" mapping. It focus on the prototype we are about to build itself. Form and Function are the two big parts we attempt to dig into. I tried to figure out the main function of the prototype. However, I still haven't figure put what the specific modules I'm going to use to build the prototype. Also the material be choose to demonstrate the globe will be considered more carefully.

Link to our team's board

Plan for the Easter break

As I mentioned in the report back session on Tuesday, there are still many unclear and uncertain issues have not been resolved in my proposed idea. I’ll use the break to look at Issues regarding:

• What sensor could be used to detect the input and release the certain smell as output?
• What container/fragment box for the smell could be use for my prototype? Are they going to be able to storage and release the smell smoothly?
• What visual components do I need to build for the prototype? Could I collaborate the visual part together with the team? If yes, how are we going to build the visual part together?

The self-learning and processing the things we've learned in the last workshop session will be the main goal and practice for me to do during the break as well.

This week things definitely started to pick up! We had our first piece of assessment for the Physical Computing Project and the starting step to breaking down and creating a solution to our problem space. We have really progressed our thoughts since the presentation we completed. I have a much better idea of what our end goal is and what my product will entail.

I'm interested in creating a form that can have an emotional impact on the user and create motivation for them to improve their energy consumption. An idea/inspiration I had when brainstorming potential forms was Olaf, the snowman from Frozen. He brings a lot of emotion to a snowman which creates that connection between the audience and the character.

There is still a lot of planning to do for the next step in this project. I need to start breaking down my plan from the proposal even further and begin working on that (I probably won't start that until after the Easter break though).

For now, my focus is becoming more comfortable with Arduino. We had a tutorial on it on Thursday and my goal over the break is to play around with it more and with the different sensors to see what will work well in my project. I was having a browse on Jaycar today on different Arduino sensors and there are so many cool sensors to play around with! I saw one that can detect alcohol levels which can dupe as a breathalyzer which would have worked perfectly for this cup idea a few of us were talking about at the beginning of the semester. The idea was a cup that you could bring to a social outing that would detect alcohol levels and change colours when you were getting close to the limit and then becoming over the limit. This would have been great when you're designated driver and you're not quite sure on your intolerance level and what percentage of alcohol your drink is thus not knowing whether you're under the legal limit to drive. Whilst this sensor is no way helpful for Energy Saving Emily, it was still a pretty cool sensor and I was really interested in exploring what other sensors can do/detect and what you can build from that.

Shalom

Continuing from previous week, our team has decided to work on the concept of Self-Aware Bot (any suggestions for better name??), with some changes. We decided to narrow down the concept to focus on sceen usage only instead of any tech. We decided on screen usage since its a habit everyone struggles with and is common in everyday environment - home. Hence, the concept now looks at ways to reduce screen usage in home through the an element of sass.

On the individual level, the team decided to opt option 1 and develop the concept collaboratively where each individual looks at a different aspects. My team mates Ben & Tim chose to look at interactions where the robot will annoy user while I decided to pursue the the opposite, where users can stop the robot from annoying them. There is only one way to stop the sass of robot and that is to stop it from talking. So, continued from previous blog, these were interactions used to stop the robot from talking -

Though these interactions fulfilled our purposes, it was quickly realised that they weren't friendly and presented a dytopian view of world, which we don't want our stakeholders to see/experience. Hence, I decided to move away from using these gruesome interactions and made them more subtle. The new interactions fulfil the same purposes but in a non-horific way -

Future -

During the next week or so, I will try to research more and include cheeky ways to stop the robot from sassing. My goal is to finalise the interactions in the Easter break and get ready to start testing (bit confused about testing due to pandemic restrictions).

Tuesday session

Report back

This week, we reported our progress to the teaching team and saw what other teams were doing at that moment. I saw some team were already working on the prototype which encouraged us to move forward. Also, I would like to get some suggestions or feedback from the teaching team after the stand-up session rather than just talk.

Methods for discovery

This session is quite interesting to me. First, we used Miro as a collaborative tool to explore specific content, this worked well with so many people being involved. And I think our team should also use this tool to discover our domain. Second, we reviewed some traditional research methods like observation in a new way, which we might not do in-person / co-located user research for discovery or evaluation. The alternative way is using online tools like we can do interviews through Zoom, Skype, etc, and the course activity was doing observation through a YouTube video. These changes of methods were trying to give us alternative approaches considering the current isolated situation and allowed us to conduct a study in a different way. Also, we are informed about giving people information about our study when we are doing online requests, this helps them to be familiar with our study and reduce concerns about privacy or any other safety issues. Overall, I think this section is quite inspiring for our project's research.

Breaking down the project

In this section, we were taught to map out our project by using the Miro board through 3 steps. These effects will help us to dive into our project and find new inspirations. Our group hasn't used this method to break down our project. But we will do this lately.

Thursday workshop

This section was about a general tutorial of Arduino Kit, which I have already done in last semester's DECO7230. Now I'll wait for the Auxiliary Kit for some components we might use in our project, during this time, I'll keep practicing Arduino through online tutorials.

Next step

In the previous stage of literature review, I focused on fitness motivation and found a useful evaluation method called Sport Motivation Scale (SMS) (Pelletier et al., 1995). The reason I did this background research is to find an approach to know more about our target audience through previous studies. The next stage is to use this method, adapt it to our project and to discover what could be the best motivations for our target audience to engage in our product. I will use this scale to evaluate participants’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in user testing sessions, analyze the result and define key factors to do exercise. This could help our team to design specific features that would attract our users and adherence behaviors.

As for the product’s delivery, I’m in charge of the data input section. The previous data input form is through a pressure sensor. After the pitch and consultation, we got some new inspirations about using mobile phone’s sensors like gravity sensor and gyroscope sensor, combined with fitness equipment to capture data. Another potential resource is heart rate. So, I will discover whether these can be achieved in our project construction process.

Initial planning and designing

I decided to build on my ideas and concept as discussed in my individual section in the proposal report. I have decided on the methods for research and interviews to gain a better insight into what physical interaction I can add to my prototype and how they will relate to the target audience I have chosen. This can all be seen below.

I have also had a think about how I want the final prototype to look and feel. Based on some old 3D printed shapes I have at home. I want to utilize them to create the Energy Saving Emily device. As discussed in my section of the report, I want Emily to be a physical installation in the home and something that can always be looked at and interacted with. As you can see I want it to be something that can potentially blend into the decor of the home and be something nice and beautiful but if the household members are not being energy efficient it will turn into something loud, and potentially annoying.

Next Steps

This next week I plan on conducting all my research and user surveying and research. I hope to compile this all then feed this into the design of my prototype.

I hope to also have a play with my Arduino and start to see what I can create and to what extent.

Changes to Idea

The concept has changed from last week. In the last post, I was questioning how to use music to represent numbers because I didn’t want the sounds to be instrumental; however, after conducting research, I discovered popular songs help children memorise multiplications better. Therefore, each times-table will be assigned some sort of note or bar of a popular tune. The user will complete a tune when answering questions as each digit, 0 – 9, will be assigned 1 or multiple bars with different pitches and tones. Objects will still be used to create tunes; however, each item will need to create different sounds. For the digit 0 and 5, they will produce higher pitches and tones whereas 4 and 9 will be deeper. The digits, from 0-4, will have the same tune with different pitches and tones. This is the same for digits between 5-9. Colours will help users associate the objects with the numbers on the dice.

Tuesday Session

In the Tuesday contact class, I learnt new methods for how to conduct observations and interviews with the target audience. This was a major concern I had about the project because I didn't have any access to primary school students, as did many of my team members. For me, it would have been easier to do face-to-face, especially when you need to observe the target audience in their natural space or when they are interacting with the prototype. However, due to the current situation, all of these would have to be done online. These different methods and activities helped me to understand that there are other ways to gain information from users than the traditional ways. These include watching videos of the user interacting with the intended space and interviewing people who are connected to the target audience such as a teacher aide who works in a primary school. I still have concerns about not having children to talk to as they are a difficult user group to interview and user test with, without knowing them and their parents before-hand. I will continue to explore the methods and have a better understanding of how I can use the resources I have around me and continue to discuss these issues with my team to find a solution and share the resources.

Tuesday Meeting

The meeting mainly consisted of creating a mind map on Miro to have a better understanding of our project. The team focussed on parts that we could contribute together, rather than the parts that were about the solution. Team Garfunkel has decided to work on the same context but different solutions.

I found this exercise particular helpful in further understanding the context; we had talked about it as a group but writing it down makes it easier to remember bits of information and know that the whole team is on the same page. This also made it easier to write down the team domain and not miss any important information. Furthermore, I haven’t used this exercise for the part of the solution; however, this would be helpful to visualise the different areas of my idea to continue to go back to it to know what sensors are needed for which parts, problems with the idea and what needs to be done first to have a working prototype by the end of the semester. This is better than just thinking about it and trying to remember these important bits of information, especially for me as I do tend to forget things if I have multiple tasks that need to be done.

Wednesday Meeting

The team had another meeting to find out what each team member had or hadn't done for the report. Then, once we all reported back, we decided to use the same technique from last week’s meetings where we kept zoom open while we worked. We found that this was successful, especially for me because it helped to keep me motivated and on task. I am not a person who enjoys writing and I find that I tend to procrastinate and get distracted more. I am still using the technique Lorna suggested with working for 25 minutes and then resting for 5 minutes. This has worked to some degree as I find that I get more work down, however, I still take longer breaks, whereas when zoom is on I don't take any breaks. This is extremely helpful when tasks need to be completed soon.

By Wednesday night I had most of my individual and team part done, there were some editing and writing that needed to be done for a couple of parts. The aim was to only do editing on Thursday.

Thursday Session

In the Thursday session, we learnt more about Arduino’s and I did complete some of the tutorials. I wanted to do all the tutorials during the workshop, however, I was preoccupied with the Report as it was due that day. I am a person who tends to want to spend all their time working on an assignment due that day until it is finished and submitted, though, I knew this was an important workshop for me to go to as this is where I could receive help if I had a problem with one of the exercises before the mid-semester where I am planning on playing around with Arduino's a bit more. I also had to keep reminding myself that I did have time after the workshop to go through my parts and fix any issues.

When I did the tutorials, I didn’t have any problems except for the RGB LED light which was not turning on. This did confuse me as I didn’t know why it was not working. I knew that if there was a problem that you should ask for help from one of the tutors, however, I wanted to see if I could figure it out first to get in the habit of rechecking the circuit, this would have been harder if I didn’t have the diagram, making sure the wires were in the right place. My circuit was correct, but it still didn’t work. I then used my previous experiences from last year when parts weren’t working as expected by turning it around as this sometimes fixed it. Thankfully, this time it did, and I realised I had it the wrong way round.

Contact

In the contact session, we have exercises using the Miro board. The first task is the ‘Methods for Discovery’, where we are required to explore alternative approaches for user discovery in the current circumstance. The image below is the progress I have done for the first task.

Most people use the same approach as I did: Youtube video as the source to observe passengers in the train station, which is beneficial since it can access the experiences that are different from what we used to see. The other interesting observation methods I saw on other people’s work is through social media. Due to the prevalence of social platforms, it is easy to observe people's real-time situations or access information to specific groups. The activity allows me to think of alternative approaches to conduct observation rather than face-to-face interviews and I have found many interesting insights and research methods from other students' work.

The second activity is ‘Breaking down a project’. Each team works on their own Miro board to further break down and elaborate on each section of the project. The activity provides the team different aspects of the concept by considering the pros and cons the product has and how it can impose a positive impact towards our target audience.

Reflection on proposal

My experience on the first team-based assignment is quite positive, since the teams are willing to share individual thoughts to improve the concept and make efforts on the team proposal. The only concern is that we completed the proposal very last minute. Thus, the improvement I think after the first collaboration is that the team can set and agree on the time to deliver the work as well as the responsible section for individuals.

Reflection

This week, I felt quite relieved about finishing the proposal and having a temporary break out of the dues and the heavy screening time. During the mid-sem break, I will be working on the prototype and start exploring Arduino and the possible technology to accomplish it.

Individual concept.

Initially,I was quite frustrated when coming up with the individual idea, since I could not find the ideal concept. The listing options are the one I have thought about.

• Shapes

Teaching children recognising shapes by fitting the objects into the box

• Claw machine

https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/-MMM-/homemade-claw-machine-0f26aa

• Using the claw machine to teach kids math. The idea is that the machine will show the questions by voice output and the kids have to insert the correct answer amount of candy to play the game or get back the double amount of candy they have inserted, otherwise, they will lose the candy they have inserted.

Concerns: the concept requires different materials and further Arduino elements to complete it.

The interaction may give children a negative impact of using candy to learn

• Hop scotch

Using hopscotch to allow children to achieve certain motor skills.

Between last post and this week

After my last post in Week 5, the group divided tasks for the report and wrote over the weekend. My part for the team section was the "Response to feedback" as well as describing the initial inquiry we did. I found it interesting to connect the dots back to where we started and see how far we have come. After each team member had written their part, it became apparent that there were still some gaps to be determined in our concept. Next section describes how we solved that. I also sketched out the storyboards for our report. Initially, we had only one story with positive emotions, but I suggested a scenario where we could use positive emotions to lift up negative emotions too, which I felt gave a better picture of a broader use of the concept.

Tuesday Class activity

In the Tuesday class, we did report back and then some activities. Although much shorter, and somewhat nice to hear about what people are doing over easter, the report back part of the lecture is to me still quite unnecessary. It is difficult to hear what people are saying and as we are trying to keep it short, it doesn't feel like it is giving much value to hear 'that someone has started prototyping'. Hearing about some people idea's and how they have been developed could be interesting, but so far it is too many people to give enough insight for it to give me any value.

The next activity, however, was quite interesting I think. It really encouraged us to explore new ways of doing user research. The document has been sent to us before, but this was the first time I actually opened it and was encouraged/motivated to read through and explore it. It actually gave me inspiration for methods of exploration for my individual part of the project. The miro board was a bit messy and difficult to navigate in, and different sized made it hard for me (on my computer at least) to skim through the other answers, but it worked as a way of collaborating compared to just typing it locally.

The last activity for the class was to together with the team fill in a miro board to define our concept thoroughly. We thought we already knew everything about our idea, but wanted to complete the miro board of it to ensure we 1) Had everything defined and 2) All agreed on details on the idea. We did discover that our target audience was rather vague (in the report it was described as "people who are close with other people"), and together we agreed on a user group. The miro board also encouraged us to agree on some specific details of the concept, like timeframe and materials. Below is a snippet of our miro board.

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Further teamwork

After this class, we had a meeting where we decided who were doing which part of the prototype. Initially, when trying to decide which parts each person could do, we got slightly nervous that we might not have enough work. Later, when we finished writing our individual parts, I saw that we were able to come up with a lot of interesting questions and research methods for each individual part. This means that even though the technical part for this initial prototyping round might (might) be small, we still have a lot to explore and research, which in the end will benefit the full prototype.

I found it difficult to create a full plan for the full prototype because so many of our parts or future plans were determined by user research. We have a lot of add-on ideas for the concept, but it is hard to tell now which ones to go for and not.

Thursday workshop

The Thursday workshop was an Arduino tutorial. Although I have worked with Arduino before, it was good to get a more basic understanding of how to read the circuit sketches. We ordered some parts we might need for the prototype on this day as well, and hopefully, they will be here soon. We paid extra for fast shipping as we realised that the Auxiliary kits might not get there in time.

General thoughts

This week and last week has been a lot of work with the report, and the journal has suffered a bit from that, unfortunately. I have done a lot of work but there is no point in re-stating everything I have done, as it will become apparent in the report nevertheless. I personally think we have done a good job in refining and asking questions with the new concept. I am a lot more confident with this concept than the last one, and hopefully, it could become meaningful to someone.

Week in Review

This is the week that our first major assessment piece was due, the proposal report.

Firstly, on Monday I noticed that there was a spot on the template for a "illustration logo". I hadn't seen this before as I was mostly focused on writing the actual content and none of the other teams had done it either. I really enjoy graphic design so I jumped into Photoshop to see what I could create.

Logo Process

Initially I did a bit of brainstorming around our team name which is CDI. These letters stood for Computer Design Institute which was just chosen kind of randomly after we gave ourselves 5 minutes to come up with a name and that was what we got. The name itself is pretty vague and doesn't really offer anything descriptive such as for example a team name like "Roaring Lions". When you say CDI our loud it sounds like an eye so I have used that as the main design component. After this I then found a royalty free image of a digital background and used the clipping mask tool in Photoshop to overlay the digital effect over the eyeball. In the end it turned out pretty nicely except the only part I don't love it the really aqua blue but that colour was selected from the background. Here it is below.

Contact

This week in our contact class I learnt new techniques for conducting different types of interviews without the need for meeting with them in person. This was always going to be a big hurdle to overcome this semester because we’re all used to testing and interviewing people in person as we have done for all our previous design courses. We also really needed to test in real elevators because it gives us an indication of what people are usually thinking in this space and to get a feel for how quickly the interaction needs to happen. This will have to be all conducted online and it seems like a synchronous method such as zoom or skype would be the best way to mimic the real elevator simulation as close to the real thing as possible. Although it sucks that we can’t do it in a real elevator and work with people in person, I think this gives us a great opportunity to think outside the box and develop new methods that could come in handy in the future. I feel like there will be no ‘perfect’ method that all teams will follow but everyone will have to adapt to what is working for them especially based off the target audience they are focusing on.

Thursday Class

At the workshop session on Thursday, we learnt more about Arduino’s. I listened to Steven and Ben but mostly I was still fixing up the report as we had a few issues that we needed to clear up before submission later that day. I plan on going through all the tutorials on Arduino’s over the mid semester break so I am completely focused on learning it rather than being distracted by other semester that is due. It seems like there are a lot of resources out there for helping to learn it and the tutors really know their stuff so I think it shouldn’t be too difficult to progress.

Studio Reflection

This week's studio provided a useful insight into report deconstruction as well as highlighting methods for conducting user evaluation given the current regulations on social distancing.

I have a fair bit I want to get done over the midsemester break. I do have some little cousins which are in our target user age range so some preliminary probes and maybe an interview could prove beneficial for mapping out some extra detail for my individual design direction.

I also want to plan out the necessary materials and components I will need to obtain in order to start prototyping my concept.

Additionally, an interaction flow diagram will be useful to help me visualise the functionality and interactions that my concept aims to facilitate.

So a fair bit to get done over the midsem but I think it would prove relaly beneficial in the long run if I can get a start on it now.

Miro Boards - Train Commuters

As I previously mentioned, the teaching team provided us with some resources relating to methods for user evaluation in a pandemic situation. We were expected to observe commuters on a train and note their behavioural patterns. I found this could achieved relatively effectively through Youtube. If I had more time I would have liked to somehow get myself a virtual 'seat' on the train. As I later discovered, there were alternative techniques for user evaluation without face-to-face interactions.

Journelling, Big Brother Observations and Online Role Play I think could be really beneficial for evaluating my individual design direction at this stage. Observing the user's perceived interaction pathways and mental model of the design (even virtually) will hopefully be able to shed valuable insight on the respective strengths and weaknesses of the concept.

I might have to have a bit of a reliance on the target user group's parents to observe and detail the child's behavioural responses.

Miro Boards - Team

After the commuter activity, the team moved to our team Miro board and began mapping out our collective team context. The team were all focusing on the same domain, so, intuitively, we would all have relatively similar contexts of use. We came to the conclusion that we should all be targeting similar people, time and location with our individual design directions. We extrapolated on these points as a team and then broke off to create our own mind maps for our individual concepts.

Team Update - Post Report

The team got our report in on time, but I would have appreciated getting it done a bit earlier so that I would have had more time to edit - perhaps a bigger emphasis on the importance of predetermined deadlines is necessary.

Nevertheless, I think the team have produced a high quality report which systematically details our design process to date. Each of my team members have a promising individual design direction as well which is amazing to see!!

Inspirations

I have been trying to expand my portfolio recently and, as such, have been looking through examples of some of the great artists. I got lost when it came to Picasso. He has such a bredth of talent - which, to me, is incredible. I was looking through some of his work and it got me back to thinking about the importance of colour in representing emotion (as it udnerpins my individual design direction, I should hope so). But the mood that Picasso is able to elicit purely from his evocative colour choices was really some food for thought going forward.

Studio Session

Today's studio session was an interesting one. We learned about new ways for methods of delivery. The exercise looked at "Observing People on a Train" and how we would do this given out current situation. This was a good look into what we are going to face for our own projects and possible methods we can use to overcome the challenges of not being able to conduct testing, surveying, observations in person.

The picture above is what I added to the Miro board. This was the first time I had used Miro and I was quite impressed with what it can do and its capabilities of collaboration and thinking as a team.

My team later had a live brainstorming session where we jotted down and broke our project down into various subcategories. This helped us think about which components we would keep similar across each of our projects and potentially things we wanted to explore individually.

My next step for this exercise is to map out my own project and this will better help me understand my goals for my project and what I want to achieve through it. I am still unsure about how I want my final project to look but I have an idea of the technologies and interactions I want it to have.