To start the week off, we looked into different methods of discovery we could use in the case of a pandemic. For the exercise, we had to look at observing passengers on a train. To do this, I watched a youtube video with people on the train being encouraged sing a song. From this I gained some insights and the going forward I will be watching youtube videos related to my concept to get some valuable information.

Also as a team, we were able to break our project down using our miro board to really break down what we need to discover in the future.

Over the past week by myself, I made a basic questionnaire for people of my target audience to fill out about what they would like to see in an elevator setting to interact with.

I also was able to look into how I could use arduino with the concept we have and something I came across was posenet, which looks at pose estimation. This inspired me as it looks into keypoints. The image below shows these points drawn out.

The plan ahead for me is to do some arduino practice and grab some materials to start playing around and get a solid prototype going. I also will try and play around with posenet as well and see if this can work for my concept.

To reflect, I probably could have used more work in the team activity as we didn't really go through it as thoroughly as I would have liked. For example, we left some sections blank when we could have easily gone through it and make it really good so we could go further with it. Also with my questionnaire, I probably should have tried to put more information about elevators and my questions were quite general thus the responses weren't as great as I would have liked. In the future, in team activities, I will try to make sure we have done a good enough job and also try to delve deeper and be more specific in questions.

To start the week off, we looked into different methods of discovery we could use in the case of a pandemic. For the exercise, we had to look at observing passengers on a train. To do this, I watched a youtube video with people on the train being encouraged sing a song. From this I gained some insights and the going forward I will be watching youtube videos related to my concept to get some valuable information.

Also as a team, we were able to break our project down using our miro board to really break down what we need to discover in the future.

Over the past week by myself, I made a basic questionnaire for people of my target audience to fill out about what they would like to see in an elevator setting to interact with.

I also was able to look into how I could use arduino with the concept we have and something I came across was posenet, which looks at pose estimation.

The plan ahead for me is to do some arduino practice and grab some materials to start playing around and get a solid prototype going. I also will try and play around with posenet as well and see if this can work for my concept.

Upcoming plans for this week

For this week i would like to focus on learning arduino. As i am interested in helping kids to learn about colours for my individual prototype. I looked at some of the arduino sensors that can help to detect colours.

This uses a TCS3200 to detect colours.However,there is a much cheaper way to detect colours, which is through the use of RGB leds to identify colours. But this might require more work. I will try this method before deciding if i should get TCS3200. This is just an example of what i have found online, but i am going to learn how this works.

Contextual Inquiry

I plan to come up with questions for the interview i plan to do with parents. I want to find out more about kids learning behaviour. I also want to do some observation using youtube videos, for that i would need to come up with a list of things that i want to find out.

This week I worked on the group presentation report establishing the concept, domain space and what i want to work on throughout this course, creating a working hand with gestures to promote social distance. The report work consisted of research of papers in similar fields and on concepts using gesture controls, people's understanding of gestures both by itself and when paired with emotions. These found that many simple gestures are hard to misinterpret, allowing easy understanding, at least in western/Australian culture of signals such as a 'thumbs up', 'flipping the bird', 'rock on' and 'hang loose' signs all being quite recognizable, (with most people just reading the names here and you know what fingers to hold up).

In addition to this, robotics are at a stage where hands with dexterity and a range of motion can be created, and as a mock-up, i iterated upon the hand design and made a cardboard mock of the robotic hand for size and joint/movement reference. This will be used to see how feasible the size of the hand is along with future use for interpretation and understanding of the concept based of user reactions. The mock was given further detail to illustrate the concept, overall turning out quite well for a first draft, while future improvements can be made. These include; giving the joints a wider range of motion, capped finger tips without the rough edges or flat tips, a smaller and more pronounced 'hand' design that is clearly identifiable with a smaller more manageable size.

Methods for discovery

Today we conducted an observation with the resources we have at hand. I observed people walking from Oxford street to Carnaby street. This observation was conducted using a youtube video. For me I think the most important things to prepare before every observation is to find out the specific things that we want to know.

Throughout this exercise, I found out three observation methods that are more efficient at gathering information for the upcoming prototype that I am working on. I decided to used these methods because it is tough for me to go to a classroom and observe a bunch of kindergarten kids learning during this pandemic. Having an interview with parents or teacher will get me to understand more about how they teach kids or the behavioural pattern of kids.

1) Online Discussion Platform

2) Youtube videos for observational studies

3) Interviews with parents or teacher

We did all these activities on Miro. It was quite messy at first but it was fun and easy to use. It helps us break down what we know and what we don’t know. I find Miro helps us brainstorm our ideas more efficiently because we usually jot down our ideas and thoughts on butchers’ paper in class. This is just another way of jotting down our thoughts.

We used Miro to help us break down our thoughts for our group assignment.Based on the diagram, we managed to find out what we need to find out for our upcoming prototype. This is just a draft break down on what we need to find out for the upcoming weeks.

Missing Knowledge

• Types of interaction that interest the kids (Fine motor skills)
• Parent's Perspective when it comes to learning
• Kids behaviour when interacting it with a learning tool

Based on the missing knowledge that we have uncovered, i personally think that we need to do more contextual inquiry in order to make our prototype a more efficient learning tool for the kids to use.

Miro for discovering what i need to find out for individual prototype

After learning how to use Miro, i have decided to start using it to find out what i need to find out for my individual prototype. This is just a brief draft on what i need to find out for my individual prototype as well. I will continue to add more things as i find out more relevant details, or if i need to break down my thoughts.

Studio and Workshop Reflection

We did a lot of work in last week's studio and workshop. The report gave us an opportunity to start a conversation about how we are tracking and the transition to online learning.

As expected, I am still struggling a bit to maintain active focus and motivation. I think adopting the pomodoro approach - like Lorna suggested, could be really beneficial. I have been trialing a 25 minute work period which has been going well so far, so here's hoping that trend continues.

The teaching team were able to provide a lot of insight which helped shape my individual design direction. As established in my last post, I have moved away from subjectivity and want a stronger focus on an objective link from sound to colour. I am pretty happy with how to potential concept addresses accessibility needs and an open-ended interaction approach. Hopefully, I have been able to justify this in my individual section of the report.

Team Update

The team have been really good with maintaining active communication. I am to read through and edit the whole report tomorrow, so I am pretty happy with the team's organisation as well.

We should have a near final report by tonight which details our design process and relevant justification by tonight.

Concept Development

I conducted some interviews and conversations with friends to establish some sounds that could be used as part of my individual direction. A lot of the responses overlapped which is brilliant to show converging mental models. At the moment, sound to colour links include:

Red = Fire (red) crackling

Orange = Fallen leaves (orange) crunching under foot

Yellow = Birds chirping on a sunny (yellow) day

Green = Wind in the trees (green)

Blue = Running water (blue)

Purple = Thunder in a storm (purple)

White = Aeroplane in the clouds (white)

Black = Crow (black) cooing

Divergences included black: owl hooting at night, purple: bees buzzing on flowers, white: snow falling and orange:carrot snapping

Inspirations

I was looking into how Year One's are able to communicate their emotions. Current curriculum standards ask Year One's to draw/ paint their emotion using colour and facial expressions. I have chosen to further extend this concept to address accesibility constraints and a higher degree of creativity.

(https://kinderart.com/art-lessons/painting/emotion/)

What we did

in the past week, we were able to finalize our approach to implement the team concept, our team decided to work on individual sub-concepts under the umbrella theme on Musical Things. Besides that, we were able to discuss our team submission and separate out team sections to be done by each team member.

we realized that it was more productive for us as a team to be working on the report/project during workshop hours with zoom running and it helps as an accountability check, sort of like a study group where you have to be working as you assume your teammates would be doing the same. we would work for 45 mins to an hour and have a chat for 15 mins, that way we were able to ask questions and get clarifications on the spot if we were unsure of a report component.

also - I got my Arduino kit in the mail so I'm excited to be playing around with it to familiarize myself with the program and components.

what we will be doing

In the coming week, we will still be working on our documentation and proposal report to be submitted before the Easter break. We will be having a few team meetings this week to discuss team components and the team direction moving forward. It's nice having the assessment due before the break as I would be able to work on other assessments from other courses over the break, focusing my time on other courses before diving into prototyping after the break.

One team member of our group dropped this course due to the online teaching, so with the help of the teacher, three members of our group and two members of another group formed as a new team. fortunate, both of our topics are "body as controller".

Meeting 1

Through the first meeting, we learned about the research theme of their group. Their team is based on environmental protection games, through the body control to eliminate harmful waste, and finally get a certain educational significance. Our team uses physical control sensors to strike objects in the virtual vent space.

Through the feedback of the speech, we summarized the advantages and disadvantages of the two groups:

-Our team：

Advantages ：Specific sensors and background research are available to provide adequate information on solutions to relieve stress.

Disadvantages ：Because of the use of destroying virtual items to release pressure, this method of decompression is questioned whether it is "too extreme." Some people asked that if users use this method to relieve stress for a long time, maybe they will be violent.

• Their team：

Advantages：With a good background (environmental protection), environmental protection is a popular topic in nowadays life. We can extend the application of this theme to have good educational significance.

Disadvantages ：There are no specific plans, such as what sensors will be used to make the game.

###Conclusion

By analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of the two projects, we have generated a new idea:

We decided to use the background of protecting the environment, which can make our works more meaningful. On the other hand, we will continue to make use of body control sensors to hit trash that destroys the natural environment. (Eg: In an ocean scene, there is some marine debris floating in the water. The user can use the glove in his hand to trigger the sensor to eliminate the garbage in the ocean. This is just a preliminary idea) Such a combination makes up for, in addition to the shortcomings of the two groups, the goals and themes are also more abundant.

Week 6

Week 6 Studio

What we have done in studio is listening with the admin staff and reporting our work in front of the class. Each have 10 mins decided they work and present. Our team have selected format 3 which we have the same domain, but we will investigate and research on different target audience. During the discussion I have started planning what I am going to do on my part and the work I must done within this week. And we all present it to Lorna, I think this report section is very important and helps me a lot to work what out am I on track or not, if not what I have to catch up. Even I am on track is there any problem I must specified to ask. Turn out on group report my team and I are on track however there are no effort on induvial work and journals. Lot of changes and work must do. This reflect me must mark down what I must do more often because I am not on track at all this will make me left behind a lot.

Workshop / Tutorial

On workshop we didn’t spend lot of time on asking tutor question we come up a big question how we can do testing and prototype on the restriction on coved 19. Turn out we must do more online survey or other type of prototype instead of physical one. This remind me the DECO2300 which must make digital prototype. This make me rethink how I can design my testing section and report

On report time we spend time on research the induvial part , I have spend time on what specific group I have to work on which I found out if there are different age group like elder and kids using together is the evaluator still working ? Are there any changes must made to adapt the specific group? This is my core concept of my owns works which I will discover more on upcoming week and work out the due dates of each task.

Overall this week nothing really progress accept on the group work , this reflect me have to keep more record on what I am working on to keep on track of the class otherwise I will lose out quickly.

In week 5, we are combined with another team that works in the ‘body as a controller’ as well. Therefore, we mainly focus on coming up with a new concept as the team’s topic this week. In the beginning, we tried to combine the ideas from the teams together, to combine ‘boxing game’ which is used to help the user release stress to environment protection, we would like to change the content in the boxing game that uses removing the rubbish floating on the sea to instead of smashing the goods that inside of the room. After consulting the tutor about this concept, we are suggested to think about the problem space and the value for the user before come up with a concept. This suggestion let me think about the design process. As a Chinese student, I know that when coming into the design, a lot of Chinese students have a bad habit that gives a concept without doing research about users. However, as a design student, I have learned that “ design is a subject that serves people, which should be user-oriented.” When I was a freshman. Now, I study interaction design, which I should think more about how to let the technology providing a better experience for the user. Thus, as a designer, I should always warn myself to understand the user before coming up with an idea.

Then, we decided to do literature review about stress and environment protection to see if we can be inspired by the problem space, the technology and the existing system that are mention in the literature. I have read some related works such as the technology that can reduce the rubbish in the sea and the games that can help to teach children to protect the environment. Base on it, I find that teach children to protect the environment is important to let next-generation protect the environment as a hobby. I come up with an idea that using a physical and simple game to teach children to protect their surrounding environment, show the impact of the pollution for the environment, the animal and the human. However, in the group meeting, we finally decide to use ‘stress’ as the domain in the new team, and we choose to develop ways to help students release stress. Each of our teammates will focus on a different way to help students to release stress.

In the beginning of this new identified topic, I have read some articles about the target users. When searching the key world ‘student stress’ in the online library, in the first page, several papers focus on the stress for college students. Cause its relevant high percent appearing, I suspect maybe college students’ face more stress than younger aged or facing more types of stress. I will do more research to prove my guess later.

A paper called “When the problem is stress: Every area of a student's life provides its own type of stress. Coping tactics range from "flight" through drugs to "fight" through various therapies” (G. W. Jay,1983) attract my attention. It is published in 1983, I want to compare what kind of stress that past student and current student both faced and to see what’s kinds of new ways that is a fiction compare for the ways in the past, it may useful for me to develop a fiction interaction for future. I want to know what kind of ways that useful from past to now and to see if it can be changed more novel. Anyways, I will do surveys and think about my individual Sections in the next few days.

Reference

G. W. Jay, "When the problem is stress: Every area of a student's life provides its own type of stress. Coping tactics range from “flight” through drugs to “fight” through various therapies," in IEEE Potentials, vol. 2, no. Winter, pp. 23-26, Fourth Quarter 1983.

Three other students and I were assigned to the "body as a controller group, and we determined several project directions through preliminary discussion and understanding in class.

Breanstroming：

• for children with autism/ADHD - use the body instead of the brush (most children with autism are reluctant to express and prefer other ways of expression, writing, and painting can help them express)

For example: using your left hand to indicate a pen wipe your right hand to indicate a pen...

• for those with claustrophobia (fear of the dark..)The plush toy can sense the child's temperature and control the brightness of the light
• Decompression game: for the over-stressed using sound to create text, the text will show the specific text through speech recognition, with the text hit the monster. Wave at the monster start way, take some deep breaths (vibration) detection, with the relaxing music "classical music or the slower pace of the tune, you can relax, reduce stress" and picture or scene "humans and animals triggered when the body secretes a let a person feel comfortable" oxytocin, could help reduce stress and pain relief. Watching funny short films about animals can have a similar effect."
• using face recognition technology, the user's face reconstruction is projected onto the screen and then the user can decorate it with virtual decorations provided and then print
• the game to help the fitness within the limited area to touch the area users need to use physical contact to achieve the goal

Team Project

Then we decided on a topic through discussion. We decided to play an interactive game and control the game through body control.

[Stress - Free Zone]

• Decompression gloves - for high-pressure people

The goal: to release stress because of environmental constraints

(Destroy objects by virtual impact -> simulates destroying/destroying objects in real life)

• How to control

1. "Boxing" gloves judge the strength of the user's swing by the strength of the vibration and start the game with voice control
2. add a voice recognition feature to determine stress by the way the user yells and vents
3. Add a leg-sensing feature (walking forward or in other directions in a virtual scene)

Background:

our domain is to relieve stress

Nowadays there are many people must face a lot of pressure every day which were from their work and life.

They usually don’t know how to vent or pour out.

As time went by, these people will produce depression and other psychological diseases.

According to our survey, most of the stress in life comes from work, so our target users will be office workers and students.

Secondly, our design is more game-oriented, so game lovers also will be our target users.

Our design was inspired by a poster. which is the machine prints words on the screen by recognizing speech. Then attack the targets with these words. Another inspiration was “Vent space, just like this picture, in this area user can let off steam by punching objects. the users will enjoy broken objects in this room

Pitch

This week we had our pitches, and everything went successfully. We received some great feedback

The feedback from the pitch generally focuses on the interactions: inputs and outputs, the target user group and the learning topics.

Topic

The team was recommended that we should aim for the final product, so that the technology will not limit our design.

Input

Many people have raised the concern that the interaction with the teddy bear is not suitable for children (Initial concept & Image 1), and it is suggested to let the kids make emotional connections with the toy in order to learn in a comfortable environment. Recommended inputs include clapping, colour identification and voice recognition.

Output

Besides from the glowing ears and voice encouragements, friendly tone and phrases can be used to motivate the kids, such as ‘You are close to the final answer, give it another try’, and music, vibration and heats can also be added to give children more feedback on various senses.

Audience

Another crucial feedback is that the target group is ambiguous regards to the demographic and use case.

Learning topic

The scope of the learning activities is too broad, so that it might be hard for the team to focus on one solution. The potential topic includes Math, English and Colour identifying.

Physical solution

Different types of toys can be developed based on children’s like and different learning goals, such as microphone for English vocabulary pronunciation and fluffy rabbit for kids who like peter rabbit.

Design Evolution

After receiving the feedback we decided to take away / add / alter some of the characteristics of ITSY.

We took away the aggressive input methods such as twisting, smashing etc. as it was not very appropriate for our target audience. Which also narrowed down to 5 year olds, especially parents with 5 year old.

Cancellation of classes

This week was supposed to be week 4, however, due to the coronavirus the university had to close for a week and all the classes had to be shifted by one week.

Group work and meetings

Despite not having classes, me and my team finalised and completed the team charter and worked further on developing the topic. We came up with a name called ITSY for our toy, we thought it was cute and easy to say for little kids. I also created a little drawing on illustrator for a bear that we can annotate over.

We created the slides for our pitch and then later I recorded everyone's voice and made the final pitch video.

Here is the video

World cafe

During the world came the whole class walked around and visited all the different ideas and got a chance to discuss them. Each of us got to discuss about 3-4 topics (depending on how many times we hosted each topic ). In my case I hosted 2 topics Emotional Intelligence and Creative learning .

Here are the ideas I discussed:

Emotional Intelligence

We talked about how emotions can be altered or effected through design and computers.

We really liked talking about the party cup because it showed how much alcohol you drink and help you keep track of your drink. Later on we adapted it to be a potential tool that can help people avoid over drinking and stay under the limit if they are planning to drive home.

Enhanced Mundane spaces

Enhanced Mundane was the topic that my prototype had fallen into. We discussed how this is an escape from reality and it can be made into many different things. We listed some characteristics for an enhanced mundane space.

• Escape from reality
• Change of scenery
• Relaxing
• And most importantly not be intrusive/ disruptive

Creative learning

This was the last topic that I was part of for the discussion. I really liked the learning and teaching part of this idea. We started discussing the MORT toy that Michelle created and went onto adding features to it and making it better. “A toy that would help you with your learning” At that point we did not have any ideas about what we could teach.

Voting and topic selection

Later on we got to vote on the topics we like and what designs we wanted to pursue.

Soldering workshop

Later on Tuesday i did the soldering course and created a light that glows inside a box that we created in the laser cutting workshop.

Talking to Bash Isai

Thursday’s class began with a video call with an UQ alumni Bash Isai. He talked about graduate roles in the future and how to prepare for recruitment assessment, internship etc. He also pointed out some tips such as how much easier it is to apply for a position when doing it through a recruitment agency. We also did this cool activity where we write 50 words about ourselves then narrow it down to one word, mine was creative.

Team Formation

Meeting the team members

Later on Thursday I got to see which topic got and who my team members were. I had gotten the topic Creative learning, which was my first choice of topics so that was great. Then I got to meet my team mates who were Sean, Sheryl, Han and me.

Defining the concept

What is Creative Learning?

To me creative learning is designing and creating a method of learning that is different and new. I am a very visual and auditory, that means If I find it difficult to retain information by reading only, however, if I see a physical example of a video explaining things, my brain learns it much quicker. That's why I want to delve further into this topic.

Narrowing of topic

One of the key characteristics of the product will the ability to improve motor skills and enhance their intelligence through a method called synchronised learning.

I suggested we use similar technology to the Bop it toy

1)Pull it

2)Twist it

3)Push it

4)Flick it

5)Smash it

Workshop - Analyse User Interviews

Between Tuesday and Thursday, we all did one user interview to gather some initial data to further move along our project. To start with, in the Thursday workshop, we summarised and analysed our interview findings. What we found was that people aren't very comfortable sharing emotions and when they do they prefer to do it face-to-face. Moreover, our users told us that they feel it helps to talk about their feelings. We also gathered some similar data on how our users perceive emotions and thoughts around emotional sharing. I feel we gathered some good data that would easily help us decide on the one concept we will pursue as well as an initial understanding of our target audience. Doing these interviews wasn't ideal given the current restrictions set in place due to COVID-19, but I feel we managed it nicely as we all live with other people that were in our target audience. One thing to consider though is that the people we live with won't provide a complete picture as the demographics are fairly limited. It's also going to be interesting to see how we can manage our way around these same restrictions when we have to test our prototype, but I'm confident that we will be able to perform some quality testing sessions when that time comes.

Based on this feedback we started to discuss some ways to change our focus and came up with some ideas that revolved around moving to a self-awareness focus, making it controversial, making it easier for people to talk or focus on the positive emotions. After a short discussion, we all figured we were most excited by exploring sharing positive emotions with others. This choice was made due to how our data told us that people don't really talk about their positive emotions and that they are not very comfortable sharing their negative emotions.

Around this time we got some guidance from Steven as we had some difficulty focusing our concept and getting down to the nitty-gritty details. Steven gave us some great advice which helped us immensely, which was to take a step back and look at what questions we are trying to answer. By now we had decided on wanting to focus on lifting the spirit in the home. Steven told us to focus on what we would like to achieve, as in, find a goal. He gave us some examples from his own experience that helped us understand what he meant with finding our goal.

After the meeting with Steven, we took a step back and went at our goal. We started off with "How can we lift the spirit in the home?" and went through a couple of iterations where we asked ourselves questions and tried to answer them with a new version of the goal. One example of this is how we asked ourselves "How can we help sharing positive emotions between homes?". We figured based on our data that people were most comfortable sharing with close friends and family that we should make it more personal or humanise the emotional sharing. This led to a new goal of "Help personalise emotional sharing and lift spirit of others when remote". We went through a couple of more iterations before we landed on something we were satisfied with that we all felt covered what we wanted to achieve. Our new goal at this point was "Encourage positive emotional sharing with close ones remotely". We had a short brainstorming session on new concepts that fell under this new goal before we decided to take a break and meet back after a couple of hours. We all agreed to write down some new questions based on our goal for when we got back and to create a concept with a rough sketch, a target audience and an intended experience.

Later that day, we all met back online and went over each of our questions and sketches. My questions were as follows:

• Can positive emotions be shared?
• Can positive emotions be shared in the form of memories, music, sounds, color, lights, haptic feedback, and or heat?
• Are positive emotions equally valuable when shared digitally?
• Can we encourage emotional sharing?
• Will positive emotions overshadow people’s need for feeling down?
• What does positive emotions look like for different people when shared?
• When do people want to share positive emotions?

These questions, in addition to the ones the other team members come up with are meant to be used throughout our development. Moreover, I presented a concept of a wearable that would encourage sharing memories with people you had experienced them with previously. This device would allow for recording information in various formats and had the intended experience of encouraging people to reflect and reminisce with close ones on the good memories you shared. Without going into too much detail the high-level concept is a wearable that when visiting places with memories from before, can ‘rewind’ and see, hear, feel a collection of those memories on your wearable device. Friends who was there will be notified as well that you are reliving that memory and can join in on it. After all ideas and questions had been presented we went over all of them and gave feedback to each other. Finally, we picked pieces from the concepts we liked and put them all into one final concept to present in our proposal. We divided the concept into two parts, one that we would like to present as our intended MVP and the other part as a future version where we would like to be in an ideal situation.

Before the meeting ended, we decided on some research topics we all were to explore further and divided the concept proposal amongst ourselves.

Over the Weekend

I got to write about and detail our goal and research question, which was nice as I got to take a look back and see how we got to where we were now and why we chose our path. Moreover, I found it useful to dissect our research question and define every bit of it and how it was all connected back to our domain of Emotional Intelligence. Like everyone else, I too found a peer-reviewed article to be used in our proposal. I found an article on how shared experienced regardless of communication is amplified, which to me were quite interesting. This article had some limitations for our purpose as it didn't explore if the same effect would be possible if people shared an experience remotely. Hopefully, through our prototypes, we will be able to provide an answer to this question. On Monday, I wrote the section on how our concept was relevant to the brief. Having already written about our research question I was quite confident on what our concept was and how it relates to the brief, so I had no real difficulty doing so. Lastly, before our meeting on Monday, Thomas and I went through the document and made grammar and content suggestions to improve what was already written.

Potential Methods of Inquiry

As for my own concept, where I'm looking into the interface response to incoming messages through coloured lights and how to play the recorded message, I'm focusing on post-prototype methods rather than pre-prototype methods. The reason for which I choose to not focus on pre-prototype methods is due to the team's initial research which covered enough for me to move forward with my prototype. With that said, I will, to the extent it is possible and ethical, do a combination of prototype tests with interviewing and observations. Where this approach is not feasible, I will instead focus on an online format trying to retrieve similar feedback. Moreover, given our restricted situation, I have considered conducting a heuristic walkthrough of the prototype using the other team members as experts, but this has yet to be decided in the upcoming weeks.

Tuesday - Contact

On Tuesday we started off with a 'stand-up' where each person in all teams was to explain what the team and they themselves had done so far in the course. Although interesting to listen to what the other teams are doing there was a lot of overlap and repetition from many team members. So far in the process, most of what we have done is as a team and therefore there is little extra to tell when asking a second team member. I believe we would hear more unique aspects moving forwards as we are moving into the individual parts of the course. However, I'm also concerned about the amount of time this takes up and if it's worth the time as I didn't feel like I learned anything from this exercise.

After the stand-up, we jumped into team chats to work on our concept. In this meeting, we talked about starting to write the report and work out how we could split the concept between ourselves. We decided that we wanted to split prototypes based on outputs and inputs. Given that Thomas and I live in the same house we decided that we could take one input and one output so that we are able to test if everything works as it is supposed to locally before testing remote. Moreover, Tuva was to prototype automatic input and Marie were to prototype an output. However, at this point, it was still unclear what the individual prototypes should be.

At this point, Ben came in to give us some feedback on our concept. He brought up some good points on how manual input could be an extra barrier of entry. We also discussed how we should consider the physical aspect of the concept such as what the balls are doing and how they could be interacted with. Ben also gave us some technical suggestions to look into such as ESP32s or ESP8266s for the connectivity and Galvanic Skin Response(GSR) as a sensor in case we wanted to measure emotions as users were holding the ball in their hands. Finally, we asked for some tips and tricks too for user interviews.

After our feedback from Ben, we went on to create an interview protocol to get some early information on how people understand emotions, how they display them as well as if and when they are comfortable sharing emotions. We decided to write some open-ended questions to begin the interview with, continue with a task to allow users to show us how they think and then end with some more directed questions.

Between the Contact and the Workshop, all team members did one user interview to help us refine our idea further. We designed the protocol together in our meeting after the Tuesdays Contact and analyzed the results together during Thursday's workshop. I feel that everyone did a great job on the interviews and that we gathered some really valuable data from it. I hope that we can keep gathering good data throughout the semester with these new restrictions in mind. I would say that we are pretty lucky in this fact since all members have roommates in one form or another so physical testing is still possible. That said remote testing is still very needed since those that you live in close proximity to tend to adopt some of the same views as you and have likely had some insight into the project you¨ve been working on. Although they'll still provide valuable data we'd likely get better data if we interview people who have no previous knowledge of our concept. This means that just like in my Master Thesis we'll have to get a little creative when it comes to testing our physical prototype, although this can be cumbersome it's also interesting to see what creative solutions we can come up with for testing our work.

During the workshop, we got some help from Steven, he helped us decide how we were going to focus our concept, what to include and what to leave in, he said that we should create a sentence that our project should be based on, almost like a research question. Based on that we created the following sentence “How can we encourage others to share positive emotions with close ones remotely”, armed with this it should be much easier to decide whether a function or interaction is valuable to the project by considering if it serves the concept's primary purpose, which is this sentence.

Before we examined the results of our user interviews we still considered using automatic emotion detection for our project. Due to this, I did a lot of research on this topic, looking at different solutions. I landed on using Google's Firebase pack for facial recognition which also has the ability to detect emotions based on facial expressions. After several hours I was still not able to get this to work and put it aside. However, we have now decided to not include automatic emotional detection, I see this as a bittersweet moment since the research I did is no longer needed and essentially wasted time, the good part is that I no longer need to make it work and can focus on the bits that will be useful.

Since Thursday all I've really done is writing different sections of the Proposal I was partially responsible for writing about the Theme and the Relevance to Theme sections of the proposal. In addition to this everyone had to write about at least 1 peer-reviewed article relevant to the assignment. The theme sections were relatively interesting since it allowed me to delve a little deeper into what experts include in emotional intelligence and how our concept fits within it, I was delighted to see that our concept covers almost all categories of emotional intelligence, which means that we have interpreted what emotional intelligence is and thereby have a concept that fits well within it. For my peer-reviewed article, I was very interested in how humans connect colours with emotions. Although it is likely that people from different cultures view colours differently and I'm sure we'll have to do our own testing with colours its nonetheless useful to have a baseline to work from and see how other researchers have explored this space.

Recap

This week, team CDI started working on the proposal report. IN doing so we refined the concept into what we wanted. Initially, we re-designed the concept to be more mentally focused. The idea that Alistair came up with was a voice recognition system that gets people to think on the spot while going in between floors within the elevator. From this, we investigated how we could prototype this concept and research into the mundane space of elevators.

After the studio session, we spoke to Clay about prototyping and how we would be able to prototype and test users seeing as we are now limited due to coronavirus. He responded in saying that we would need to think outside the box to replicate a scenario of someone using an elevator, he suggested that we could use a cardboard box or a cupboard and set up buttons and lights to give a sense of being in an elevator. Below is a snippet of our after-workshop meeting in zoom.

After our workshop session and a team meeting (and with a chat of tutors), we realised that we got rid of all the likeable and physical interaction that was part of our pitch proposal. So, we went back to brainstorming an idea that incorporated both the original pitch idea and Alistair’s idea. We wanted the concept to still allow users to interact with each other while also adding in the embarrassment of moving around in the elevator. Finally, we came up together with a cross between voice recognition and a charade-like game for the elevator to move. If there is a single person in the elevator it gives the user an image of a human silhouette posing, the user must pose the same for the elevator to move. This uses a Kinect-like camera to see that the person mimics the silhouette. And when there are multiple people in the elevator, The elevator gives one person a charade topic i.e. something really easy etc the person then acts out that and the other people have to guess what that user is acting out for the elevator to move. If the users guess it correctly, then it goes to all the floors that have been selected in the elevator.

Moving forward, the team is refining the report as well as researching more into the concept and how the different possibilities for prototyping.

This week has been mostly focused on finalising the idea within the team. After receiving various forms of feedback from students, tutors and users we finally decided on a concept that I think everyone one the team was satisfied with. It has been a difficult process due to lack of inspiration and a theme that turned out to be more difficult to design for than anticipated but in the end we manage to come up with something that I personally is excited to work on.

My team had meetings on both Tuesday and Thursday and where we went through the feedback and finalised the idea. It was decided to work on the team section of the proposal over the weekend and be done by the team meeting on Monday at 3pm. Overall, I think the team has done some good work and everything seem promising for the future of the project.

Zoom workshop

This week we had our first zoom workshop which turned out to be a long team meeting instead. We received some feedback from the tutors which helped in our process to conclude what we would be working with. The online solution is still not the most ideal way to have a workshop since it basically requires good equipment from all part and a stable internett connection which I don't always have, but it'll do.

Going forward I'm exited to start prototyping and working with the project.

Zoom meeting

Our team has analyzed the feedback we got during the pitch and find some ways to improve our concept. We decide not to use the website to display questions since it does not involve many interactions with the kids and some kids are too young to read text from the website. We are going to improve our input and output based on our research on HCI for children. Furthermore, we need to further specify our target audiences and learning topics.

We have come up with some personas for different users and do more research on teaching and learning methods.

Individual focus

The target users that I will be focus on are pre-schoolers who start learning some easy math. I am going to make a turtle toy and let children improve their motor skills, also learn math and color at the same time. The turtle toy will mainly consist of three parts, a turtle shell with different color regions that let users insert sticks in it, turtle feet that let users to shake and turtle’ s head with a light and speaker on it.

There will be a display screen to tell users how to play with the toy, for example, the screen will display some icons that tells user put 3 sticks in the red area and 4 sticks in the green area, the speaker on turtle's head will also produce auditory feedback about the instructions. I choose to use icons and voice output since users can easily understand what they should do and will be more interactive. Users need to insert certain amount of sticks into different area of the turtle shell and that help them learn numbers and colors, after that, the screen will show some easy math questions like ‘shake the turtle’s green feet if 3+4 equal to 7’, children can easily answer the question by seeing the number of sticks that inserted in the turtle shell. So that the toy provides visual support for children who start learning math. The light on the turtles’ head will turn green if users do correct responses.