Progress

In this weeks' online studio session, each of us has a short stand-up session and reporting to our classmates as well as the teaching team about the progress (team & individual approach), concerns for the coming week, plans for the coming week.

In consideration of the 3 options given by Lorna to move forward for this work, we have a group discussion about sharing our ideas in response to these options. We reached an agreement that is to work together to complete a project. Our decision is based on the following concerns:

• The complexity and integrity of the concept. As there are multiple interaction methods contained in our concept, if we made it into the individual approach, the workload will increase dramatically. In order to finish the complete work, we would have to cut back on some features and change some of the initial interaction methods, which will affect the integrity of the entire idea.
• The technology and material preparation of the concept. When I got the Arduino kit, I found some tutorial videos about some common components and sensors and thought about what needs to be used in subsequent projects. According to the understanding at this stage, I think we may need to use the following components (the specific detail still needs to consult tutors to confirm the feasibility of the application): Recording equipment, Playback device, Infrared sensor, Motion sensor, LED lights. At present, the Arduino provided by the school does not meet our needs and we still need to purchase any other equipment, tools, and props, such as test tubes, recording equipment, players, etc. We think it is better to complete a complete work than to buy three similar equipment to complete a simple version of the idea.
• Collaborative experience & safety concerns. We have cooperation places, and will also take corresponding protective measures. Collaborate on a project to promote intra-group communication.

In the following project, we are more based on the group to complete the improvement of the concept. Due to the particularity of this semester, we still have the main direction of everyone. I will cover it in the following content.

Team

This week, our team focuses more on the assessment part that is the group proposal and individual statement which due next Thursday. Many of our discussion is about understanding the brief and conduct the relevant research for the purpose of putting forward a well-considered proposal from a more comprehensive perspective.

For the group report part, we reach the following agreements:

• Team domain

Relieve life stress. As we found in the background research, fast-paced life makes people more and more impetuous, and people will also generate more and more pressure because of social factors. Based on this, we would like to find a relevant method that will link to the relief of the stress of people.

Through the discussion, our understanding of the "context of use" is different. With questions, we asked the tutor about the explanation of this part in the group meeting ended in the studio session and understand this refers to explaining to the readers about in what circumstances will the user use our device.

• Feedback

After the presentation, we have received plenty of feedback on slack. We have discussed our insights for the feedback and thinking of how we could better our idea.

We concluded the following insights that are worth working further into after the group discussion:

• Multi-person participation.

However, we think the original plan can achieve multi-person participation to some extent, for example, people can collect sounds separately, and arrange music together. (We think that why users comment on this point may because we did not mention this part in detail when introducing the idea in the video presentation part, which caused some misunderstandings, but this also made us notice the importance of multi-person participation.)

• How to reduce the noise to guarantee the quality of the sound.

One possible refinement: Detect the number of decibels, decibels that exceed the noise range will not be recorded)

• Provide the pre-set melody.

Refinement: provide some pre-set melody in the flask, the melody can be changed by knocking the flask, similar to air pod playing the next song

• Using temperature element to control the speed of music playback

We will rank it as a less important part and would make little refinement according to this point, as there is no direct relationship between temperature and speed of the music.

• Edit/control of a certain sound.

Although this feedback is meaningful, it is contrary to our target audience (ordinary people with little music-related knowledge and this feedback seems too complicated for ordinary users and works better with those professionals)

• Collect multiple pieces of music. Users found out people will take lots of droppers with them when they are attracted by multiple voices which will be inconvenient to do so.

Possible refinement: three buttons on the test tube, each button represents a tone, or use an eight-segment digital tube, click once to record the first section, press twice, record the second section.

• Add smoke, lighting and other visual effects
• Use the brightness of the light to indicate the length of the recording time

At the same time, we assigned the part of the team report. I am responsible for research on the target audience and intended experience. In consideration of the feedback and the in-depth research related to our idea, I have a more precise description of the target audience and I will describe this part in the individual part.

During the group meeting, what confuses our most is that we are not sure what data is intended to collect at this stage, how to filter feedback because there are more feedbacks collected, some feedback views are contradictory but all sound reasonable, how to integrate feedback and determine which needs improvement is also a problem we need to consider.

Based on this, we consulted the tutor and he gave us some methods that we can choose to collect feedback, like research, workshops, prototypes (paper, body storming & physical) and etc. Review the prerequisite courses we have studied before, we would like to combine HCI theory in order to collect the data related to "useful" "desirable" aspects and the method we would like to use for testing the video prototype would be: TAM(Technology Acceptance Model), we would like to design the questionnaire in 4 dimensions according to TAM(perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), attitude (ATT), intention to use (ITO)). We sent out the questionnaire and have received several feedback, my teammate Iris will be responsible for analyzing the feedback collected in the testing session.

Individual

In the cooperation stage of the group, I am responsible for researching potential users, in our original idea, we set the target audience as: Music lovers and producers; those who are interested in daily sound; those who are sensitive to sound. But for feedback research on video prototype, I realized that this equipment seems unnecessary for the music producer, they have already got the professional recording equipment and excellent music producing software. Based on this, I suggest narrowing our target audience to ordinary users who love music and want to create music. I would like to remove the professionalism and do some relevant modification on our persona and storyboard.

As for the individual approach, I am responsible for research on the function: Play sound and delete stored sound. At present, I am thinking of how I can contribute to the team. The aspects I will be focusing on might be: How to play the sound regularly, how to control the playing time, how to choose to play tracks, etc and how it can relate to visual/physical interaction, design, technology, playful concerns.

Concerns

The current problems are mainly concentrated on two aspects:

The first is technical difficulties. According to the current project, we are not clear about the realization of the following functions according to the existing knowledge reserve.

1. How to transfer the recording in the dropper to the test tube, and how to delete the sound in the dropper. (The possibility of using Makey Makey to realize the function)
2. How to remove the sound from the flask by pouring the flask to the trash
3. How to judge the length of time, and light up according to the length of time

The second aspect is the online research. As for the testing session, we need the real users to test the interaction part contained in our work and do the refinement according to the feedback. Due to the particularity of the situation, the prototype testing session becomes difficult to achieve.

Future Work

1. Working on the group report and think more about the individual approach.
2. Taking visual/physical interaction, design, technology, playful concerns into consideration when conducting personal work
3. Find technology-related information (such as coding, sensors required, how to design the circuit...) that better work for the completion of our work
4. Conduct more academic research and find more relevant work for inspiration.
5. Have a general understanding of the kit on hand and think about how we could do with this tool.

Individual Concept Development

After going through all the critiques as a team, there were a few recurring trends and themes that resonated with me. These themes revolving around accessibility considerations and emotional colour theory.

With that in mind I began to further develop the pitched concept - Twisted, into a system that would facilitate the needs of colour blind and visually impaired users.

I started with the thought that I wanted to contextualise colour, for this user group, through audio feedback. Thus, the emotional ties individuals can form with colour could be simulated through audio.

From here, I ideated for a mat with three columns: happy, sad and angry. Colours corresponding to each of these emotions would be randomly distributed on a grid based mat. Each colour would also have a sound attributed to them (happy sounds = C Major Scale). Users could then move the colour and respective sound into the row that they believe it reflected (eg blue=sad, so move to the sad column). Then, the users could 'play' the colours in that row from left to right. The audio tracks of the colours would then sound and colours with a similar colour palette should sounds complementary. The same would apply for the inverse (a colour clashing within the row would sound out of place). However, there was a great deal of subjectivity in this concept. With that and the fact that this is targeted at 6 year olds in mind, I decided it might be beneficial to move to a more 'objective' approach to contextualising colour

I then tried to ideate for an objective link between colours and sound. Nature seemed like a familiar context for the user group so I pursued that route. Colours like blue would be linked to running water and red to fire etc. Colours would, again, be randomly distributed on a grid-based mat. Users would then have to move the sound/colour to suit the appropriate picture overlap (the images would remain in a static position while the colours behind would be able to move). While I was starting to appreciate the objectivity of the concept, I was back to square one with a closed interaction approach where there was a 'right' interaction with the system. We received feedback suggesting against that approach in our original team pitch. So, I wasn't happy with that aspect of the new concept and was starting to think having a static image and moving colours may be confusing to such a young target user group. Finally, I also noticed how I had started to drift away from the purpose of 'emotional' colour theory.

So, I moved away from the grid-based approach because I found it limiting and needed a fresh take on things. This time I started with a circular form. Arcs of the circle acted as colour 'buckets' which could be used to mix colours together. I kept on with the 'objective' links between colour and sound but wanted to use this combination to facilitate creativity. Now, the concept revolves around mixing colours together to reflect the user's current emotion. Just as the colour mix, so would the associated audio - hence forming an audio narrative for visually impaired and colour blind users. Users could then draw a face in the centre of the mat with this generate colour/sound. Then a direct and visual/audio link can be made between the users emotion and the colour/sound they created

Well, it did take a very intensive week of iterating upon an initial concept - but I am starting to feel a lot more confident with the design direction I am not following. I have done a fair bit of research around the domain, the Australian curriculum and the benefits of colour theory. So, hopefully this concept has some solid foundations for future iteration.

I still have a fair bit to do in relation to objective links between sound and colour - access to the target user group would be especially useful. But, I will have to find workarounds - I have started with some discussions with friends and family. Other than that - Individual report writing will occupy me for the next while as will reading through the team section of the report

Report back

How was zoom?

Zoom has been ok. I've had internet and computer problems. On Wednesday, it worked smoothly. However Thursday was a nightmare and we tried Discord but it wasn't much better. We settled with just having our voice streaming through Zoom. We're using Facebook messenger to chat, but it is hard to discuss big ideas and try and get your ideas across when typing as opposed to talking. I've also had some pretty sucky computer issues (my laptop battery doesn't hold a charge) however we can make do for the moment.

What did we pitch?

Last week we pitched the Maze robot. A sassy robot which helps you through a maze, and can be untrustworthy, depending on whether you trust it or not. The problem space was looking at whether technology can be trusted.

What have we done as a team?

We have been idea generators - from the feedback, it has been difficult to scope down the main ideas and where we want to go moving forward.

Achievements made moving forward

Need to figure out which idea we want to go with. The main report is also due in under a weeks time.

Q's

If we build it ourselves are we all supposed to build different parts of it? How to determine whether we want to work on it individually or as a team?

Anshuman came up with a 'doggo idea' whereby users place 'to-do' cards on the robot and it alerts (barks) them to finish the tasks. If the users haven't completed the task, they could tap the dog to get it to stop barking. Over time, as users would be getting lazy, and the dog is at foot level, users might mistreat the dog. The dog would then bit the user, take further action, etc.

This space could uncover how users would react differently to how they treat a robot dog to just a robot - would they feel some human value attached to it and treat it with kindness? Typically dogs are friendly and happy. Giving tech its own feelings can make how we respect it change.

Ben looked for a more specific reason to betray the robot as a means of progressing yourself further.

- getting lazy

- game (you wanna work with the companion)

- games have a defined structure (good set of rules)

- everyday activity where there is a reason to betray technology?

Arduino

The Arduino kits have arrived! Very grateful to have received my kit, and really looking forward to making something awesome.

I've already had a look through the included book and it has some fun projects.

Finalised team idea

As the team, we 'boiled down' our ideas and went through this process a few times. We looked at what a maze is. A maze is a single solution problem, there is one clear way through it. A user has a sensation of feeling lost whilst being in a maze, and would rely entirely on the robot to help them through. You have to trust something you have no trust for. There is also a sense of not knowing the finish. It could be around the corner or many turns away.

We explored what it means to be lost. Steven (our Tutor) suggested looking at a car driver. When you are driving, you can be lost, and completely dependent on your GPS. Having a sassy robot assistant (like an enraged Italian taxi driver) could make it work.

We also thought of a personal assistant interaction. Having a robot which could control the amount of technology you are using. As a team we could explore the different ways it can look. Perhaps the assistant is like a small dog. It could yap and scream at you if you're watching too much television and turn it off. If you wanted to stop listening to the dog, you could 'zip' its mouth shut or power it down by removing its 'brain'. Obviously these aren't real things but a replica of sorts, to aid in an everyday interaction whilst keeping it physical.

As a team, we liked this idea the most. There is a fair bit of research out there on using technology too much, and the negative affects on the body. From biting into sleep time (which negatively impacts mental health) to using up productivity time, and putting pressures on yourself to get work done sooner, it can be hard to regulate screen times.

We are looking to explore different designs of what the assistant should look like. Perhaps a dog, or a human, or a ball. The assistant could also be given different personalities, such as angry or passive aggressive, kind and supportive or impatient and snappy.

As the current COVID-19 climate makes team collaboration hard especially on a physical project, applying these different personalities to the same overall concept could work.

Through this process, it was important to come up with core concepts that the robot would keep to. These are that it is sassy, it is in control, it offers a service and is needed, and there are consequences for disobeying it.

In the workshop, as a team we looked into the report in more detail and we kept doing some research into our concept.

As we read through it all, we realised that our new concept didn't have a real "physical" aspect to it. After a chat with tutors about our concept, we realised that we needed to change this aspect of it to add the physical factor. To do this our team discussed potential solutions that we looked into earlier that we could consider.

In the end, the team decided to split the interactions with a single person vs several people in the elevator. To add a physical factor, for the single person, the elevator gives the user an image of a human silhouette posing. To continue, the user must pose the same for the elevator to move. This is similar to what an xbox kinect would entail in their interactions. For several people in the elevator, the elevator gives one person a charade topic then the person then acts out that and the other people have to guess what that user is acting out.

To do some research in how I would prototype this, I had a look at a speech done by Charlie Gerrand - a developer who talks about using arduino and JavaScript to create a similar experience but with street fighter. It was at the SUMMIT conference done in 2019. The video is below

Going forward, as we had already finished most of the sections of the report relating to the old concept we had previously gone with, we have to change and amend these sections to suit the new concept as well as add more research into it.

Sentimental plants

Background:

Nowadays there are many people must face a lot of pressure every day which were from their work and schoolwork. They usually don t know how to pour out. As time went by, these people will produce depression and other psychological diseases. The Sentimental plants designed by me can help these people relieve stress and maintain physical and mental health.

Brainstorming:

At first, I want to make it a toy or a picture I think it can be a toy that people can hug the toy, but this kind of stuff only suitable for most of the female. And the interaction of pictures is not enough. I have to find something that can make people relieve the pressure and suitable for most people instead of discrete populations.

According to the research, I found that the plants will make a human feel better.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/urban-mindfulness/200903/plants-make-youfeel-

Secondly, I begin to think about how to help people relieve the pressure.

1. There can be a camera to scan the user s face, the facial expressions scanned by the camera can detect basic mood changes (such as the degree of mouth rising).
2. When the user touches Sentimental plants, static electricity is generated. At the same time, the instrument on Sentimental plants can also detect the user's heartbeat and breathing frequency, so that the user's mood can be further detected.

1. Speech recognition sensitive words. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3514871/ The users can pour out to the Sentimental plants, the plant is not human, so the user needs t worry about their secret was out, can according to the words to give the good suggestions or cheat with users. What will the user feel better?
2. When not in use, Sentimental plants are constantly changing in four seasons. However, through the above tests, Sentimental plants can accurately detect the needs of users. Thereby slowly changing the colors and seasons of the plants. Research shows that color changes mood: https://www.verywellmind.com/color-psychology-2795824

Target users:

 Autistic patient

 Lovelorn people

 Solitary man

Scenario:

When the user faces P, the camera scans the user's face. When the user touches it, it will relieve the stress by detecting that some relaxing music is played first, and it will also change the colors of the season and plants. The user can choose whether to chat with it and during the chat process, the user will be advised and relieved the pressure to achieve the effect of reducing stress.

UQ Innovate induction

This week I attended the UQ Innovate induction, which was very useful in our assessment. In addition to this, I completed all the required online tutorials prior to the session.

At first, we learned how to cut the plastic sheet, by combining machines and programming we can create any shape we want to cut. Different machines correspond to different materials, so we need to use the machines properly.

I had the challenge of ethics, security, and privacy which is highly relevant for any technology (and most aspects in life, really). Then we learned how to use a machine to cut and polish wood, these operations look easy but dangerous to operate, so we need to be familiar with the use of these machines and the safety rules.

World Cafe

We had a world café session this week before we form into a team. We discuss different topics with different people in the class. In this conference, I explored different themes, in which we used the idea of posters and divided them into 19 categories, each with a new theme. They face different users, interaction methods, and domains. however, each student only can join in 6 discussion groups. Time was limited, so I chose the groups I was most interested in. It's fun to share everyone's ideas, we can get new works from others' ideas.

Body as controller

This theme is the one I'm most interested in. We went through all the posters and tried to get some inspiration. In this theme, the human body is used as a controller to interact with the machine through movement or sound. The target audience is sports and game lovers. We tried to combine some of the ideas on the poster and generate new ideas. First, we thought that in addition to humans interacting with machines, pets could also interact with machines.

Ability-centric Interaction

Creative Learning

Tuesday class

The Tuesday class consisted of reporting back on what everyone had done and any concerns. I felt this class to be somewhat useless, it was difficult to hear what people were saying and a lot of repetition since every team member were answering the same questions.

Team discussion

After that, however, my team and I had a discussion on what to do with our concept. We tried defining who was doing what part of the prototype and we spent the time coming up with a template for a user research. We wanted to know more about our users before deciding on an idea, specifically we wanted to know more about what they would want the purpose of such a concept to be, what would they get out of having their emotions on display like in the concept.

Our intended learning outcomes of the interviews were:

• Emotional Input
• Most Valuable way of Translating the Input
• Most Valuable way of Displaying the Input
• What do we want people to leave with?

Interview conduction

The interview I did (digitally) was very interesting. I got a lot of new feedback on how to do and not do it. My participant was mentioning how they were good at sharing feelings, in the form of discussion. They did not see the point of our concept because they couldn't imagine being in that situation where you lived with someone that you couldn't communicate with. On the other hand, they had friends who never wanted to show emotions and they could not imagine them ever being like "I'm angry" or wanting to display their emotions to anyone they live with, except from their very close ones.

This was very interesting because it had me question the purpose of the concept - my interviewee didn't seem to want to display emotions like we had imagined - why not just talk about it? The only way they could see a visual or audio display of their emotions to be useful was if they were in the extremes of negative emotions and did not want to talk about it (yet).

This sparked me to think that we might be able to focus less on the negative emotions (that people might not wanna share - or is already sharing), and more on the positive emotions. I made the below sketch for my thoughts before the Thursday workshop.

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Thursday class

The Thursday class was good because we got time to work with the project while having tutors available. We went through the data from the interviews and noticed a trend of people talking about their emotions if they wanted to, or being comfortable with not talking about them if they didn't. We had a chat with Steven who prompted us to figure out what goal we were trying to achieve. We had an interesting discussion of different things we wanted to achieve - from lifting the spirit at home to removing negative emotions. We wrote down each time we had a different wording of a sentence and ended up with "Encourage positive emotional sharing with close ones remotely" as our main goal. Then we had to find questions and target audience to "solve" this. We had a break and developed one idea each, my idea ended up being the one below:

This way we would incorporate novel ways of interacting, it would be playful and hopefully fit the goal. I added several different tweaks and add one that could be considered as well.

After discussing all the ideas, we ended up with a concept very similar to the idea I presented. This can be an interesting and fun way of sharing between households and lifting the spirit. Throughout the week we are going to write in the proposal about what we are planning to do and do some research on the field(s).

General thought

I'm generally excited for this course still, even though it has changed a lot. I am curious about the testing (if happening at all) but other than that I am excited for the development and seeing how it all evolves. I think my team has done a good job of communicating. We have a lot of different ideas and no one really knows where we want this to end up in terms of concept, and I think we are doing a good job with asking constructive questions to help ideate and build on ideas, rather than being critical.

Studio

This week was the first time that we broke up into different classes with the studio taking happening on Wednesday and the workshop happening on Thursday. At this weeks studio we got told that it wouldn't be possible for us to use the workshop at UQ anymore due the whole Covid-19 situation.

After we went through the normal administrivia every group conducted a report back to the class which gave everyone an indication on where people were up to both on an individual and team level. Our group spoke about the dancing elevator and just a few of the changes we made based on the feedback from the presentations last weeks. I personally said that I wasn't have much trouble with the online format of the course as we have experienced so many collaborative tools over our university journey such as google docs, messenger, slack and so on.

For my journals the feedback I received wasn't very good so I need to make sure that I spend more time on these in the future. The main issue was that I wasn't saying exactly what I was doing and instead being very vague and general about the different things we were conducting as a class.

Team & Individual Work

Our team did a lot of work last week on the proposal so most of it has been completed going into this week. I worked on developing user scenarios to give an idea of what the interaction of the elevator would look like. It varies based on the different users groups that we have and for me I am dealing with elderly and disabled users.

Unfortunately at the workshop on Thursday the tutors thought we should go back towards out original idea because it has a much stronger physical component. This was a bit frustrating after doing so much work on the new idea which was the game of saying categories to the voice detection system in the elevator. In the end we made a decision to stick with the second ideas main concept except now it would be a charade style interaction where people act out different things and the other people in the elevator must guess. This will then reward them by taking them to their floor. We need to discuss and do more research into what happens if they get it wrong because the original idea of making them walk up stairs might not work for a lot of people if they are disabled for example or are in a hurry. This would make them frustrated and annoyed and the system and it would make it more of a hassle rather than enhancing the mundane space.

Anki Vector

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As our team chose to use Anki Vector as the intelligent character for our project, it is essential to know how it works and how we can re-program this robot. Here is our new member - Ninja vector

Anki Vector has already integrated some functions with the app, like audio-based commands, facial recognition, and interactions with a cube. Besides, there is the official SDK (Self Development Kits, https://developer.anki.com/vector/docs/index.html) for users to customize their own vector by using Python.

It is a little bit hard for me to fully understand its original python files and the only functions I can program for now are the basic movements, audio playing, and charger finding. Although I can't understand the detail codes, I can read the construction and imitate its functions from the tutorial files, which are the current approaches I use.

For the future plan, I will keep exploring the usage of SDK and try to build the object recognition and animating functions.

AR technology

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I found a useful AR tutorial:

This tutorial introduces the Vuforia that we can upload any image as the tracking target. And combine with unity to achieve the tracking and demonstration. As the video published in 2017, some procedures have been changed. The new version of unity integrates the Vuforia tech itself. The detail information is indicate in this site:

https://library.vuforia.com/articles/Training/getting-started-with-vuforia-in-unity.html

Studio this week

This week our team started working on the report that is due next week. We had a team discussion in the studio session to talk over feedback, the pathways we wanted to go with the concept and possible technologies we could implement in the final solution.

We had a good discussion on how we would go about individually continuing in the concept space. We decided we would all have our own take on the final form but work together as a team to work out functionalities and features.

I am also working the background research related to our concept space. I am looking into the topics of People and Technology, Human Behaviours & Attitudes and Saving Energy in the Home. I have done a fair bit of research on People and technology and the use of it in the home. It was interesting reading that most people would trust smart device if it were user friendly, proved to be reliable and was marketed well towards them. I think this was an interesting article to come across, as I personally sometimes struggle to put my trust in smart devices. I have a Google Home at home and we have decided not to use it any more as it started interrupting our conversations at it started listening to keywords in our conversations. As a family at home, we found this creepy and turned it off. I guess initially I bought the Google Home because it was marketed really well for use in the home, it show how it can make life more convenient and easy to access and control parts of your home. But after use and having it in the home it proved to be a nuisance.

The graphs below show some of the interesting statistics found in a study in the UK.

Plan for the Week

For the rest of the week, I plan to continue on my team section of the report and have that finished to allow the team to check and proofread any of the information. I also need to start brainstorming and thinking about my individual section and the form of my prototype and what I want to get out of it. Additionally, over the weekend I hope to start collecting some recyclable items that I can use to prototype with my Arduino. This should keep me busy while being stuck at home :)

Wednesday Studio

Today was our first studio split up into our designated days. We had some administrivia at the start and with the upcoming restrictions by the government, we are no longer allowed access to the workshop. This makes things potentially a little harder but also wasn't unexpected. We still have access to the teaching team and their knowledge over the online platforms so we will make do with what we have. We discussed three different approaches that our team can take when building our project. We discussed this many times last week and we've agreed to all work on the same concept with same or similar sensors and all produce our own form of Emily. This means the large physical aspect of the project will easily be able to be worked on in our own houses but we can still work on programming and sharing tips and documentation on the online platforms.

Everyone in the studio then participated in reporting back to the rest of the studio about our progress as individuals and as a team and our concerns moving forward. It was really comforting to hear everyone else have the same concerns and that everyone will be in the same boat.

This issue of access to user groups was a concern that came up in the studio today. As our team is focusing on typical families in the house environment, we all have access to that (at this point, it's pretty much 24/7 access - which I guess is a positive to this lockdown).

Update on Progress

Our team seems to be on track with our progress. We haven't started our report yet but we have put our focus on our concept and research. We still have to complete the team section and I have yet to begin the individual part of the report.

I started to conduct some basic research on our concept and domain. One article would give me slightly more information that would then lead me to another article/topic. It even was just interesting to see what people had to say about negative reinforcement and the term cognitive dissonance. According to the Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, cognitive dissonance is

"a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what a person already knows or believes and new information or interpretation which contradicts prior knowledge or beliefs."

I also attempted to play around with Arduino but it failed miserably. I followed the instructions to attempt the first exercise but the board kept turning off whenever I plugged it all in. I don't quite know why but I will resume learning Arduino next week after the report. There looks like there's some pretty cool equipment within the Arduino though and I'm interested to see what more we can build with it.

This week our team started working on the report that was due in the next week. To do this, we started by deciding and refining our concept to what we wanted. We did this by looking into the feedback and having chats on zoom and Facebook messenger as a team to see what we would like to go further with. We decided that Alistair's idea of a voice recognition system that gets people's brains working doing a simple task was the way to go. Below is his response in the Facebook group chat. This was an important milestone as it set us up for the future development and research for the concept.

From this we decided to go with this concept and we started looking into how we could prototype the experience. We also did some research into elevators and their user experience. (A research article I came up about elevators when doing my research on the mobile interaction with elevators inspired me this week, as many other avenues I didn't consider were so important to the experience. Take a read if you're interested!) We concluded that the voice recognition part could be prototyped but could be difficult. To reflect, it could have been easier to change it up by making it less about the voice and just on touch commands.

In terms of the way the team is going in the future of the concept, the team has decided to do the same concept, but focus it on different perspectives i.e. audiences. We also discussed in our zoom chat and as well with Clay about a few questions about the prototype and what would happen if we just made one prototype. He told us that we could use one prototype as a team but we needed to test different things within it. He also gave us a good idea to prototype an elevator in a cupboard at home which can be very beneficial. This has impacted us a lot as we can now have that option if we need it to happen. It also gives up the option to test a lot more things if we decide to go this way. Below is a screenshot of the zoom chat we conducted with the team

Going forward, the team and myself will need to refine, evolve and finish off the report so that it can be done to a high standard. I will be doing some more research into my chosen audience of office workers in elevators and see what experiences my prototype could bring as opposed to other audiences other team mates have considered. I also have to find some materials that I can use for my prototype.

Tuesday Contact

During this weeks class, we had a standup where everyone talked about what they had done since last week. Although I see the point of these standups I think they took much too long this time. Part of this is, of course, the online factor, people are not used to it and switching back and forth takes a little bit longer and there were some technical issues. That said, I think it, in general, took longer then it needed to, in future I would prefer everyone just quickly do a point by point things end then instead of discussing things with everyone rather do it more group by group with the Tutors and Lorna opening up more time for the groups that are not involved to work and advance their own projects instead.

After the standup, we all went to our own group zoom meetings and continued working on our ideas and proposal. During this meeting, we as a group talked a little more about our idea and how we intend to split it up, at this time Ben entered our meeting and we talked with him how we had refined our idea and what we could do to improve it. He mentioned that we should have more interaction with the visual output on our prototype which is what we will be focusing on going forward. Having most of the details ironed out we created an interview protocol so that we before our proposal can conduct interviews and use those to guide our further idea refinement and hopefully help us divide our project logically so that all members get something fun to work on but still work on the same idea.

Testing the Arduino kit

After the lecture and the group meeting, I had some idea of what kind of things we may need to use for our project. So in preparation, I did some research on the components we have in our Arduino kit and played around with them to see how they work, how they are wired and how those components code look and function.

Since we've been talking a lot about colored lights I used the potentiometers to create an adjustable RBG light.

I tried using the engine to make a fan (we won't use a fan but we may use the engine)

Lastly, I used the servo since it's probably better to use the servo to control tiny doors and such because it turns out that you have great amounts of control when using the servo. You're able to set exactly the degrees you want it to go to, not just on/off (did not take any pictures). Now I'm planning to see what kind of facial recognition (preferably free) is out there that'll work with the Arduino

About our Group

Unfortunately our two group members decided to drop this course. During the work, we are very happy to work with them as a team, and they have still completed the work that is expected to be assigned to them in the presentation. Thank you very much for their enthusiastic work in the team.

About response to feedback

Reasons to keep players playing

Through group discussions, we will continue to enrich the game content, and we may set up more game mechanics to make players interested in continuing to play this game. At the same time, we will think about more directions to keep players enthusiastic about the game, which may include reflection on reality, the actual meaning of the game, sports and health.

Physical interaction

Haptic feedback is a very interesting way of interacting, and it is rare in conventional VR or AR games. Since our main interaction controller is the body, we may use more sensors to capture body movements while achieving physical feedback at the corresponding locations

Topics

We are still discussing which direction is more suitable for our ideas, but in terms of the degree of connection in daily life, it seems that it is easier to understand garbage pollution.

In our team meeting, Friday of week four, we decided to pick up where we left off earlier in the week, by focusing on the rest of the feedback we received after our presentation. Moreover, we aimed to refine our concept idea further and come up with solutions to how we could split our project among our four team members.

Feedback

We summarised and condensed the feedback we had received to make it more actionable and easier to take into consideration when moving on with our project. There were a lot of interesting ideas to consider from what we received, such as how users themselves could input a mixture of emotions of their making, combined from for example clay or colours. Handing over control of the input parameters would allow for a more exciting approach which could potentially be more reflective of how complex emotions are. Moreover, it might feel better for users to have complete control over combining and creating a representation of their feelings at that given time. Another suggestion was to move to a household to ensure everyday use. Our original concept did lack a specific everyday use-case, which is why we especially took this suggestion to heart and which formed the basis of our pivot. A third suggestion was to have more complexity, as in increasing the number of emotions. This leads me to believe that either people weren't listening or that we were unable to get our message across as our intention was always to reach for such depth, but that our prototype would have to have certain limitations, which is why we talked about various ways of measuring the emotional intensity and which emotion users would pick. Another suggestion was to attain data that would tell us the connection between colour and emotions, which we also did mention in our pitch that we aimed to figure out in our initial user research. Others suggested making the installation a safe space where users would feel safe sharing their emotions, which is a important suggestion and one we will take into consideration moving forward. Some people suggested more collaborative interaction between people which we also have taken to heart in our pivot that I will talk of later in this post. Another suggestion was to explore shape and form together and how this could elevate a sense of certain emotions. Shape and form is something we are looking into that we haven't landed on as of yet, but we would very much like to explore how senses can be combined to emphasise emotions. The last types of suggestion were to have other types of emotional input such as heart rate, heat, and so on. Automatic inputs are something we are taking into consideration moving forward with our concept.

Pivot and Refinement

The rest of our meeting revolved around how we could pivot our project to be more of an everyday concept. We started talking about what type of experience we would like people to leave with and came up with four possible paths to pursue; individual and collective awareness, emotional release, spark discussion and improved communication skills. Which opted to figure out which ones to focus on specifically through user research. With that said, we did agree on the purpose of our concept to revolve around collective awareness plus a display of feelings outwards. This comes as a response to our feedback where people suggested more collective interactions, in addition to how we as humans share emotions daily would be a nice foundation to build upon in terms of making the concept more of everyday activity. As for target audience, we were all intrigued by exploring our concept in a multi-person household focused on student accommodation, given that isolation in COVID-19 times will likely have a significant impact on people living together. Towards the end of our meeting, we had gone through various types of inputs and outputs and how they could be applied to a household and landed on a vague concept that we wanted to pursue the next week. This concept was a cylinder with balls inside of it, where each ball correlates to each person in that household which shows that individuals emotions throughout the day. This came from some requirements we set for ourselves, that the concept should be easy to display and easy to access. We played around with input and output methods for the concept, but in the end, we did not land on one specific input or output. This will have to come during our next meeting.

1. The representation of the scale

As there are few feedback mentions about the death of flower will lead to the worse mental condition for the user, we use the colour changement of petals to represent the family conversation situation.

Red petal represents the negative emotion, and the green petal represents positive. Lome can recognize pre-set keywords which indicate negative emotion. Once ten keywords have been captured, one of the petals will turn into red. Six petals in total mean six levels which represent weather the family conversation is running positive and healthy.

2.Passive guidance

According to the first two directions concluded from the feedback which is “more interaction” and “ passive encourage/teach the user to be positive”, LOME can proactively invite the user to talk to it and physically interact with it.

Once the petals tend to be entirely red ( remains two green petals), LOME will broadcast “ Seems like you are not in a good mood, please come talk to me.”, such suggests to encourage the user to vent or relieve the stress. To start the vent/pour out, the user can remove one of the red petals and plug it onto the sprout. The sprout will keep growing during the vent/pour out process, which represents the emotion is being re-born. When vent/pours out complete, the user needs to move the petal from the sprout and place it back to the flower. The petal will get back to be green on the flower again, which represent the emotion has been transferred.

3. Encourage user to release their stress properly, but help them to transfer the emotion.

Noticed from the feedback that we shouldn’t limit the method for the individual to relief their stress. Shouting/swear can be an effective method for a certain group of users, so LOME respects this method. Once the user starts to talk to the flower, the flower will become a funny toy which can twist while replaying users’ talk in a funny way (change the tone). This can amuse the user and transfer their negative emotion effectively.

4. Set up a boundary between work and study (outside) and family (inside)

From the study of work-to-family conflict, we use LOME as a boundary to remind users that they have entered the family life and should not bring the emotion from work/study to home.

This function includes two main parts:

Firstly, the user needs to say “ I’m home” when they come home, and LOME will recognize and talk to the user to ask for an emotion check-up. For example, LOME will say “ Welcome home, how’s your day today?”, and the user will respond with a short sentence for LOME to analyse whether the user is in a good mood or not. Reacted to it, the flower will only have two conditions, fully green which represent the user is in a good mood or half green half red which means the user is suffering negative emotion from work/study.

Secondly, every time that the boundary conversation triggered, it is served as a re-start for LOME. When the family have multiple members, this process will be repeated. The condition of the flower can indicate the emotion condition for the other member when the user enters home.

For example, the wife coming home first, and she is in a good mood with work. After the boundary talks, the flower will turn into fully green, and the wife will notice that. Then the husband is coming home, but he had a bad day. Accordingly, the flower will turn into half green and half red, but the husband will notice that the flower was entirely green, which means his wife had a good day. The flower colour change can also be seen by the wife who let her know that the husband had a bad day.

This function can encourage family conversation, which is also pointed out in the feedback.

Presentation

This week we presented the basic concepts of the group. Our concept is to make the user a guard with super powers. Gesture casting can solve all environmental problems such as mountain fire, river pollution or air pollution. Design and construct a virtual scene to complete the user's interaction process, and change the environmental scene (recover the ecological environment) by capturing the user's gestures. After the user completes the interactive process, the scene will prompt the financial expenditure and human resources required to manage the corresponding ecological problems in real life. Design guides users to reflect. In a world without super-powerful environmental guards, that is, in the real world, the price humans need to pay to solve environmental pollution problems, and encourage users to participate in environmental protection activities.

At the same time we received a lot of feedback.

Feedback

A reason to keep players playing

In terms of game content, we haven't done much design, so the concept seems to be not too much content.

Physical interaction

In our design, most of the interactions are implemented in a virtual scene, so we are missing some physical interactions.

About the topic

There are some differences in the nature of mountain fires and garbage pollution in environmental issues. For example, humans can reduce waste pollution in the environment through proper waste classification methods. But wildfires are unpredictable to humans, and we can only remedy them with proper precautions. As a result, the approach to addressing two environmental issues may be different for individuals.

Connection with real life

We have been thinking about this issue. After the game, how do we feed back the information we want to convey to our users in real life.

Unfortunately, due to the transition to learning fully online, my team has decided to drop the course before the census date. Sad to see them go as we've worked on our projects for four weeks now. Due to the offering of this course being online, my previous team members thought that it might be worthwhile deferring the course for a semester to fully experience the process of this course, which I fully understand.

Despite having thought about the possibility of dropping the course myself, I decided that it wasn't the best idea to defer a semester as new courses weren't accepting new students and it might be hard to catch up on two new courses. This also means that I can graduate on time!!!!! yay.

After looking through all the pitches and my options, I'm grateful and excited to be working in a new team with four other girls! Thankfully our projects were in similar domains of music and touch, meaning that I will be able to contribute my findings from the past four weeks instead of starting from zero. Although it is sad/stressful having to deal with not having a team, I'm happy that it all worked out and am able to start on the projects soon. yay!

I’m not going to lie and say everything is great because I’m feeling quite stressed about this new transition as I would need to reexplore this new team domain and I definitely would not want to make my new team feel like I’m just leaching onto their already done work. I’ve spent the majority of this week being very stressed and concerned not only about my team but as the deadline for the team report came closer, my academic grades might be negatively affected due to this new and sudden change. Thankfully, I was able to speak to the teaching team in resolving some of my concerns and it really made me feel a whooooole lot better knowing that the teaching team was able to provide support and had an understanding towards the difficult position I was put into.

From week 3 to week 4, we come up with our group topic base on the domain ‘body as controller’ and the posters of other students that we have viewed on the contact course. In the team discussion, each of us comes up with two ideas, then we discuss whether they meet the requirement of the assignment, such as if it is novel and open-ended. Then, we do an online search and deep thinking of the detail of the concept, such as how to achieve the concept, what is the value of the concept and the user group of the concept. We list our concepts when the second meeting. We discuss each of the concepts. Finally, we decided to do a stress-free zone by vote. The core technology we want to develop is that a boxing game which can let user release their pressure by doing boxing and by shouting out.

Base on the topic that we have chosen, I have come up with an idea that not accepted by the team but be agreed can be an additional section. I think the project called stress free “zone”, as a zone, only one way to help user release their pressure is not enough. So I do an online search of ways to release pressure, some elements that I find it useful to be added in the game is that deep breath, music, animal, bright color (Liu & Qu, 2017). To combine those elements with our game, an activity can be set before the game begins. To make the game begin, the activity asked the user to do deep breathing in the circumstance of light or classical music, pictures of nature of the animal, which have bright colors on it.

For preparing the presentation, we separate works, I do persona, team introduction, and general introduction of the space, technology, topic, and domain. When creating the personas, it makes me think more about the targeted users, such as how the design (our concept) attract the user to use, what kind of specific user in the user group are more likely to be attracted, what kind of specific requirements will be come up by the user and so on. In the presentation session, tutors give us two devices, one is finding more methods to help the user to release pressure. The other is that better visual effects can be used in the game, such as when the user does the action of Smashing, relevant effects like the vase broken will be showed on the screen. Due to some students drop the course, our team is combined with another team. In the following week, we will discuss the new topic that we want to do or choose one from two teams that we can use the feedback we have received.

Reference

[1] Liu, C., & Qu, M. (2017). 10 ways to rlease pressure, one minute effective, let's try！. Retrieved 30 March 2020, from https://www.ntdtv.com/gb/2017/04/20/a1321182.html

[2] pixabay. (2020). boy-cartoon-checkup-clinic-comic [Image]. Retrieved from https://pixabay.com/zh/vectors/boy-cartoon-checkup-clinic-comic-2027768/

[3] pixabay. (2020). classroom-comic-characters-project-1 [Image]. Retrieved from https://pixabay.com/zh/vectors/classroom-comic-characters-project-1-1297781/

[4] Hassan, M. (2020). Internet-people [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.pexels.com/zh-tw/photo/614071/

Week 5

Week 5

In this week the class mostly work on the team presentation, critique and getting feedback from the tutor. This is the first week we work on zoom, I found out that is a quite special experience as you can’t really talk to your classmates and discussed the idea together as everybody are mute. This cause me some time to adapt to this teach style. What a learn from this teach style is spend more time on the chat room or slack to discuss with the classmate to make it more interaction with other students, this can let me more focus on the class and gain more feedback from it.

Preparation for the presentation

Before the presentation we have discussion how we going to present it by video therefore we spend time on writing the script and filming the role play. I have spent time on filing the role play footage. This give me chance to review the skill of making video and drawing the graph of intend user each action. I learn that before filming any video footage a plan or user story map essential it help you to decrease the time of filing the footage as you will know what angle or outcome you will get base on the user story map. Also, when writing the script, we have also spent time to practice and record the time to reach the standard of the presentation.

Feedback and review of the presentation

Overall the feedback from other students are good, most of them think the idea is interesting turning a boring place into fun interaction. However, what I have revived there are also lot of concern of the idea first if the elevator is located on a busy building is the user really perform the dancing inside the elevator, secondly there are consideration for user that unable to walk or see. Thirdly we have no use the whole space for the elevator to perform interaction such as the roof. Therefore, after the presentation the team deicide to change the place to interact to outside of the elevator.

Base of the feedbacks I learn that when creating the idea, I should not just focus on how fun or interesting of the idea is, I must also consider other user group that might causing trouble when they user the product. Think 1 more step ahead and out of the box is the key of success idea.