This week has certainly been an interesting one. At the end of week 3, all students got anouncement about the pause in teaching for a week. During this break, our team consisting of Ben, me, Tim and Amraj (BATA SKWAD) got more time to further look into different inspirations for refining our concept. Our ideation process was bit on the messy side but its better to fail fast, fail often. Here's our process -

Part 1: Idea dump

Towards the end of third week, we had a lot of ideas regarding sassy tech, too many even. Some of them are:

• Dad Bot - Stands arms crossed, disappointed at everything you do.
• Evil Sister - Ignores you and gets mad when you ignore her.
• Sassy shopping center - Eyes look at you in judgement when you go towards unhealthy food section.

There were a dozen more mixed ideas like these, most of them derived from session on Wednessday in Week 3. All of the new ideas were random and didn't have much to offer. We had difficulty choosing and finalising one idea. What this experience taught us was that without a goal, ideas are useless. The day spent on ideating with no goal has no outcome. We could not decide an idea because we had no criterias & criteria's are important in making decision. To generate criterias, we had to set a goal and that's what we did.

Therefore after another discussion, we decided to progress towards ideas that actually teach you something, be it a life lesson or increasing awareness about issues. From here on, we headed individually towards second part of ideation, inspirations.

Part 2: Inspirations

The group decided to do further background research before sitting down for ideation session, this time with a goal in mind: teaching through sassiness. While researching, my mind wandered towards tech with personality. I came across Westworld (a TV show), where human like robots are made as game for rich people. The rich people torture them and robots eventually gain conciousness and retaliate against humans. Similar to terminator but, it's main idea was you get treated as you treat. In our next meeting, everyone layed out what they found interesting and a basis for concept was formed - Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. We aimed at exploring what would happen if the robots didn't obey these laws.

Part 3: The Concept

Research into dystopian worlds where robots retaliate against humans, be it the HAL 9000 (in 2001: A space odyssey), irobot or westworld gave us the direction, where the robots defy the Asimov's rule. Hence, our concept goal became to make people aware about treatment of robots and their possibility of retaliation.

The concept we came up with was a maze game. The maze was completed by a person with the support of a robot that suggests path to complete the maze. Whenever you reach a decision point, the robot suggests doors to open. If you listen to robot nothing happens but if you ignore his suggestion, robot's health goes down.

The more damage you do to robot, more sassy it becomes and eventually leads you to the wrong path. What we want people to reflect through our concept is their trust in robots. Somewhat blind trust that people may have in machines, even in online sites or softwares who share their data is too much. We just want people to pay more attention to these things.

We had our first meeting on 22/03 (Sunday), where the team concreted the concepts and completed the pitch. Each of us have done researches of synchronised learning and motor skills learning and then shared it to the team.

Problem space

Due to the prevalence of electronic devices, children are incorporating less motor skills to learn and play in their daily lives. There is solid evidence that infants and toddlers have difficulty transferring new learning from a 2D representation to a 3D object. [1]

Traditional learning techniques generally engage just two senses – hearing and vision – when providing access to information. Tangible Interaction promotes the concept of engaging multiple senses including vision, hearing, touch and even smell and taste as a medium for interacting with learning content. [2]

Solution

Itsy allows the user to learn at a more comfortable pace with more than one interactive inputs. This allow for a synchronized development of the brain. Targeting both creative and analytic part of the brain.

Website

Product

The product allows children to interact with the limbs. (inspired from Bop it toy)

Work that Inspired/Interested Me:

I came across this page called Trend Hunter. https://www.trendhunter.com/

It has all sorts of trends, art installations and interactive things that people have made. One particular on that interested me was the Interactive Glowing Globes Installation. Peru-based energy company Endesa must have had a rocking holiday party thanks to the DJ Lights installation. Created just for them, this interactive art installation responds to body movements with light and sound, making each individual their own DJ.

I was inspired by this has it meets all the criteras for our project: being playful, interactive and engages with a lot of people. This concept would be interesting to incorporate into a musical themed idea or even education and learning different colours or sounds.

Pitch

Body as controller is our domain, we have developed a project called Handy Aero, which required users to use their hand gesture to control the game characters. Our group has selected the pre-recorded option for the presentation. My part is user study. The main target audience our group focusing on are "People who have mysophobia" and "People who are tired of using physical controllers".

User Research

Because of the spreading coronavirus, users are afraid of sharing and touching objects in public area. In Hong Kong, most board-game cafe and internet cafe are even closed to stop the spreading. To enjoy gaming in this special time, gesture controller is a wise choice. Without touching any physical objects, users can enjoy gaming with others. But the limitation is, we can't adopt this controlling method on complicated games. In our project, we planed to build an aircraft fighting mini game to maximise the adaptability of gesture control devices. Also, suggested by the gamers, traditional gesture controllers are lack of feedback and interaction, we planned to build a wristband that generate vibration and other interactive elements to improve user experience in gesture control.

Feedback

We had received a lot of feedback saying that our project was too similar to leap motion and Kinect. What we wanted to was building something on top of it, but not building something similar to it. In this project, we planned to buy leap motion for gesture recognition, and created two wristbands that provided feedback and hopefully generated resistance to simulate the aircraft flying environment. But it was not discussed during our pitch due to the uncertainty and the lack of planning. After discussing with tutors, our group planned to focus on another topic in the same domain that allowed us to create something more interactive and meaningful, for example, mental and physical health, vehicles (toy) racing. Our next group meeting will be held on Friday this week. I hope we can come up with an extraordinary idea to replace the existing one.

This week we've had no classes due to the UQ break, but my group has continued to develop our concept and create our pitch presentation. We decided to submit a pre-recorded video to avoid any technological issues on the day. On Tuesday, we had our first group meeting over Zoom and focused on ideation. Following on from our initial discussion in last week's class, Michelle created a sketch with some developments on our idea. We all really liked her design and decided to continue on with this design. As seen below, the concept teaches children colour theory through using pressure to select and mix colours to create the colour shown on the screen. We have decided to call our idea "Twisted" - Inspired by the similarities it has with the game Twister.

The interaction mode for our idea will be applying pressure by standing on various colours on the palette and the control buttons such as "apply" and "more/less". The screen will have a background colour which will be the 'goal' colour uses will have to create through standing on the necessary colours on the mat. I am happy with how the concept relates to the studio and team domains, in that it certainly embodies the theme of creative learning as user will have to employ a number of creative processes to achieve the goal colour. The interaction is also certainly playful and novel through the interaction of coordinated movement on the interactive mat.

We also developed a background story for the concept to further engage the young audience:

During our group meeting we divided up sections for the pitch to individually work on. I am working on deconstructing creative learning based on our research and extrapolating on target areas such as colour theory and collaboration. This was mainly informed by the research I conducted last week into these topics. I also compiled the video with various sketches, mind maps, diagrams, personas and story boards we created.

Reflection:

Whilst we wanted to make the most of the week break, I still wanted to give myself some time off considering the past few weeks have been quite chaotic. I am really happy with our team's concept and feel that it is a concept I would really enjoy creating. It great that my fellow team mates all seem to be on the same page regarding the desired outcomes of the project and this has meant that we have been able to work together very well so far.

I will keep working on the proposal video, however, I don't want to set many concrete tasks as there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the upcoming semester and what it will hold.

Itsy

We just finished our pitch this morning and i believe that we tried to explain the idea of this concept to everyone. It was our first pitch together as a team and although i feel that there are few more things that we can elaborate on for our concept, i am still proud of my group mates. After today's pitch, ideas and feedback given to us was really beneficial for us to generate more ideas. This gave me an inspiration of what i should research on to further improve our concept.

Feedbacks For Itsy

We realised that having a web platform to promote learniing might limit the amount of interaction, many feedbacks related to "interaction" was provided on slack. Having a website for learning might be inappropriate for young children as they are unable to read a website properly. As a team, we do agree that this is something that we have to look further into. We will discuss more about this during this week to see how we can further improve on our concept!

Feedbacks for further discussion as a team

• Determine the age range of Australian learning criteria
• If its learning math, try using other tools such as blocks
• Looking into more learning topic
• Using voice output for the kids(Age 3-4 years old) as they can't really read
• Attracting children's by adding music or design a game.
• Twist, pull ir pushing the toy might be a little too brutal for kids
• Small touches to the bear like making it start growling or roaring happily when succeeding would make it easier for the kids to get attached to.
• Giving the toy a little bit of a personality to create a connection between the toy and user so that they are motivated to use.

Idea after today's feedback

Itsy will teach kids about colours by using a interactive screen that is install on the tummy of itsy. The screen will show different colours and itsy will tell the kids to go around the house to find the colours, the kids will have to scan the colour by using the colour scanner that is install on itsy's eyes.

Itsy will then tell the kids if they have found the right colour or not by using a voice detector. More discussion will be needed as a team before proceeding to implementation of this design.

Feedbacks for Pitchs

Pitch 1 : Fire safety using audiometrics

Using Extend Reality in a home-setup will create a more immersive environment, as users are more familiar in their own environment. It will be much easier

for them to practice fire evacuation plans.

Pitch 2 : EMS - Housework Thread

Maybe using sound to help users understand the ball movement would be a good idea.

Pitch 3 : Emotional Birds

Good way to measure emotions visually. Maybe incorporating other ways to improve a person's emotions through sound can make it more interactive.

Pitch 4 : Musical Points

It might cause some distraction due to the movement of people taking public transport. People might feel uncomfortable using this technology. Using colors to invoke other people positive emotions can

be an idea.

Pitch 5 : Team BrotherHood

Interesting Concept ! you can think of the possibility of how this pillow might affect people emotions when they are stress or angry. Maybe do more research on what are some things that can detect their emotions.

Pitch 6: Garfunkel

It might be frustrating to have all the mundane objects making usable sounds. Having sounds whenever users are doing something collaborative will be fun and interesting to look at. For example having collaborative sounds to make a tune when the users are close to each other.

Pitch 7: Team Twisted

Cool concept ! Maybe incorporating more fine motor skills so that it help kids to learn better.(Maybe more interactive movements like jumping, and moving your arm) and creating a pattern. This game might be difficult for kids to understand, having some tutorial to teach them can beneficial for them as well.

Pitch 8: Lome

Interesting concept to visualize emotion.However, think of how this concept can help people that are suffering from emotional stress for a long period of time.

Pitch 9 : Ninja Run

Interesting Concept to teach the kids on how to code, maybe you guys can look into how you can teach kids using specific teaching methods or finding ways to educate with kids with special needs.

Pitch 10 : Helping Hand

Interesting concept. Making something more portable for the user might be easier for them to carry around instead of wearing it around their backpack all the time. It might also have an opposite effect as this might draw more attention rather than preventing social isolation.

Pitch 11: Bad Skwad

Seems really fun and interesting ! Having multiple user interaction would be nice.

Pitch 12: Mobody

This seems rather similar to a kinect motion game. Maybe exploring more gestures and making this as an everyday interaction would be cool.

Pitch 13: Fitlody

Using different variations of music to pump up their intensity or using soothing music when they are about to cool down would help them.

Pitch 14 : Hedgehog

Really interesting concept.However,try to think of different ways of interaction and also make it become more portable so that it can be played in other places.

Pitch 16 : Team Triangle

Interesting way of interaction. You should also look into ways that can accomodate people with hearing disability as well.

Pitch 17 : CDI - Dancing Elevator

Exploring some other input methods instead of using a password could be fun. Maybe like a quiz or puzzle where you have can have multiple ways of interaction to complete the quiz or puzzle.

Pitch 18 : Team Hi Distinction

Having different materials will give a different feelings.

Emotional Birds

Looking back at our presentation, I believe we managed to cover a lot of information and give the audience a good sense of our concept. Our team started to go through the feedback after Tuesday's session and will continue to go through the rest in a separate meeting on Friday. From what we have seen so far, the concept fell short in the everyday aspect of the brief, which we will discuss in further detail on Friday's meeting. We have already looked into how the concept could be moved into a household, so it might very well be that we end up pivoting from our original concept during this week. There was also some feedback related to a lack of output interactivity. This is something we have to look further into as we believe too many features might take away from the core purpose of the concept and rather be a distraction. More features aren't always better. Moreover, I believe a concept could just as well focus on one place of interaction instead of splitting the focus between two places of interaction. With that said, we're going to discuss this in further detail on Friday's meeting and might end up with a different concept by the end of this week.

General Thoughts

I found that most presentations were, for the most part, within the requirements of the brief, with a few exceptions. Most concepts had minor issues only which I think is natural at this stage of the development as ideas are still rough and unrefined. However, there was a lot of potential and creativity in the various concepts pitched. My only concern is the feasibility of many of the presented ideas. It is nice to see the ambitions and dreams of a finished concept, but I do believe several teams will soon find it more difficult to create than what they initially assumed. Especially those who seek to measure emotions in one way or another. It is definitely going to be interesting to see how the various team will prototype their concepts and see the concepts evolve as we move forward in the course.

My feedback

Fire safety using audiometrics

Consider how it can be made accessible to the elderly given that the concept users AR technology. Some people might find it difficult to use and navigate through a phone screen.

Could probably be easier if used with AR glasses instead of a phone as it will react to body movement instead of having to point a device around.

In terms of immersion, I would argue that VR is a better option as AR lacks the same sense of depth. If that is important to the concept that is.

EMS – enhanced mundane spaces

You could consider AR to open up for multi-room play/inclusion.

Consider using different sound effects for each household tool and how they all could be different games that support one core gameplay.

Team Zoomista

Could you use a combination of a touch interface and body as a controller to make it even more interactive?

The Nagging Cushion

Will the user actually have to carry the pillow? This seems like an additional hurdle to overcome to use the pillow instead of just having a 'away from pillow' timer and general trust of users

Team Garfunkel

How will users be able to distinguish between which item makes what sounds. Given that music is a combination of several tones it would be nice to distinguish between various tones on sight, a connection between the sound and the physical item.

Team Twisted

Could this work with only one user? E.g., after having stopped on the yellow colour, you will have to move over the other colours to get to the apply pad. You should consider how people won’t mistakenly activate another colour when walking past other colours.

As a colour-vision impaired user, I would definitely enjoy having something that separates hue, saturation and lightness for me to help me understand what colour it 'actually' is given that many colours can look the same. E.g., use voice, text or icons to further distinguish colour combinations.

Also, as a colour-vision impaired user, I find HSL to be the most helpful way of learning and distinguishing colours.

Lome

Consider using the already developed voice assistant on various phones to be the sound input of your device given that some of these already use AI to understand language and tone. This could also provide users with a sense of control as they have to speak to the phone to activate when the device is actually listening in on conversations.

Ninja Run

Consider how you could use the physical space other than just horizontal block alignment to visualize what happens. E.g., could blocks be stacked on top of each other to visualize the number of times a loop runs?

Consider how you could teach other things too, such as HTML, CSS not only scripting languages or programming languages.

Helping Hand

Could it also help people get into social situations, not only shoo people away?

Bata Skwad

What is the connection between the problem space which talks of device sentience and the concept pitch presenting a maze robot?

How does a robot giving suggestions and ramming into your leg fix the problem of devices not working for you and people not trusting tech.

It sounds like the machine is focused on a really broad set of functionalities; can it be scoped down?

Mobody - Handy Aero 2020

It seems rather similar to leap motion. Could you make use of this existing technology and improve upon it to use other body parts as controllers in addition to hands?

Fitlody

It would be interesting to see if it could work both ways, as in the music adjusting to your actions and you having to exercise according to how the music and floor lights change.

Give me a beat saber version of fitlody.

Team Hedgehog

It could be interesting to have a visualization of your movements after the game finishes.

Could be interesting to use sound to navigate around in a dark room / maze.

Negative Nancies - Energy Saving

Maybe giving Emily ‘human or animal traits could help the users care about the messages it gives.

Half-ice no Sugar - ITSY

What will the various interactions do? E.g., what will an ear twist vs an arm tug mean, and how will this correlate to a specific learning outcome?

Output could be glowing patch, heat, buzzing.

Team Triangle

Is there a timeline where you can build the music sequences using these vials? It’s a nice and creative way of capturing, mixing and playing with music. How would sounds mix? Are there any controls to adjust the volume of each sound, when they enter and exit and so on?

Team 7

Could it be something else than a game or add it as a gamification on top of some mundane task to make it more of an everyday thing?

It would be interesting to explore how to teach people of danger signs, such as teaching users to sense dangers using electro haptic feedback.

Team CDI

Could the elevator take you to the wrong floor if you are performing the incorrect dance move? As in not stopping there for you to walk the rest of the floors but move one floor closer or further away for each successful or unsuccessful dance move.

Think about how dancing in the elevator may impact people who are uncomfortable in the elevator to begin with, that wouldn’t enjoy people jumping up or down.

concept: instead of elevator, use a horizontal escalator such as the ones at the airport. It could be a joined effort to make it move faster and would look like a neat line dance for everyone else watching.

Team Zookeeper

It would be more interesting if questions were difficult to choose between as in would you take a train vs a bus and what ramifications will the various choices have.

Could questions be based on activities in your home so that people become more aware of their choices?

Team Hi-distinction

Could you move away from the screen to make it less similar to consoles with motion sensing? Could boxing output some interesting artwork such as being interpreted as different hues and saturations to colour in an image and hitting certain areas to colour in that area?

Feels a little weird to be studying physical computing -online. During the week I had the change to have a good think about how this impact would translate to the work we will produce by the end of the semester.

• How would be able to collaborate?
• How is user testing going to be conducted?
• Will I be disadvantaged if I do not have tools/materials at home?

I am still on the fence about staying enrolled in this course as I was most excited to work collaboratively and participating in the final exhibition. Having to learn this course online might defeat the core purpose and aim of this course and I’m not too sure if I’m keen for that. Additionally, there is still a lot of uncertainty with how the course will be conducted, I predict that we won't have much access to workshop and UQ innovate tools which I have already had to spend time getting inducted for. For now, as a team, we have heavily relied on slack and zoom to conduct team meetings and have conversations on how we will move forward to a more individual-based project, from splitting up the project into smaller components.

Regarding individual projects, I am concern as to how well I can produce a physical prototype with my current skillset. As I am more familiar with web dev and information system, it would be quite a challenge for me to translate my skills into ideating a concept to producing it. Lorna mentioned that we are still able to work as a team but I’m not too sure how my teammates feel about this in regards to social distancing guidelines. Going back to the team to discuss our approach to the concept and its execution would be a good place to start in the next studio session.

Preparation

During the pause, we were able to work on refining our concept and conduct more background research to support our concept. The research domain I focused on was how colours relate to mental health and how it evokes emotion. I found it interesting that colours have social associations to them, for example, the colour green evokes peace and calmness. It is interesting to read about colours and its emotional value. We found that having colour/sound interaction in an environment where commuters 1. have time to interact with the concept 2. is likely to feel social pressure as they are going to /returning from work or school would be beneficial as colours and sound could calm and re-center users focus, perhaps enhancing work/schooling environments.

Pitch

The pitch we gave as a team was pre-recorded. My team mate Laura was able to edit the video really well! I personally thought the message/concept was presented very clearly. Having pre- recorded sessions definitely helped as zoom was being iffy all morning for me.

Link to video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2r3FQcjyH0&list=PLhvozOmj2M0Or2bBb-oGxtO7N8g60dR4q&index=11&t=49s

Reflection

Things to think about after feedback was given

• Will sound be disruptive
• Will having crowded trains be an issue
• Maybe having headphones will be better
• More research on colours having multiple meaning
• Maybe instead of a screen, have something that you could interact with throughout the trains
• Depending on the time of day and types of people on the train this might be annoying or distracting eg. work people
• Accessibility issues
• explore facial expressions rather than hand gestures
• using footsteps instead of gestures

What to do next?

The feedback has given me a lot to think about, I think the next step for me is to incorporate the feedback to our concept to improve it. as a team, we would also have to discuss which approach is the best moving forwards as some feedback contradicted each other, in doing so we might also have to conduct additional research to inform our design decisions.

Recap

This week and last week has been absolute chaos to say the least. The Coronavirus has impacted all of Uni after the first case was discovered to have infected a UQ student. This then forced UQ to take a week off where they reassessed how assessment would work going forward. This was expected as a lot of pressure was on uni to have a response to the issue especially with all the students in close contact and the level of international students who have just come back from overseas.

It was pretty scary seeing Italy's number as my sister is currently in exchange over there at the moment and won't be coming back until June. In this time the government has told her to come back but unfortunately there are no planes leaving Italy so she is completely stranded.

Group

In the meantime our group members kept discussing the idea of the dancing elevator that we came up with the previous week. We had to get all our ideas and produce a presentation of concept to the class for feedback. Originally we were meant to be presenting in class but because of the current situation a pre recorded video is fine. It made it much easier to get across what we wanted to say because we could adjust it based on the timing and being able to see our script as we were talking.

We presented our idea to the class and got a lot of valuable feedback. Some of the key points are listed below:

• Dance or use the stairs, you will need to keep in mind that an elevator is also used for people who can not use the stairs. You will also cause some social pressure where people will need to get the dance moves right or everyone else in the lift will need to use the stairs (this could be seen as good or bad).
• Oooh, like the idea of context of a car in traffic! Elevator - would have to be a super quick experience, worth timing the lengths of trips - there’s something interesting to play with there. How does this work for multiple people in the lift at one time? You would have to be very careful about the building in which this was implemented. Bash mentioned an issue with an elevator project at UQ - they attempted something playful to encourage using the stairs and generated some significant complaints from building occupants who used the lift.

From this feedback we are going to think more towards the actual reason behind why people are using elevators in the first place, as an alternative to stairs. This may be because the person using it is disabled or has trouble walking up stairs.

This week I looked at a few examples of similar applications that test social awkwardness and public interactions. The first interaction I looked at was a YouTube video by CityStrokes which involved designing a social interaction with strangers. The focus was placed on an implementation to change the behaviour of a society who has developed around minding their own business and not socially engaging with strangers. It was alarming to see how little people the confidence had to come up and try it whether that be because they were embarrassed to try something outside of their comfort zone or because they simply didn’t have time. Both these factors would also need to be considered in my prototype as it is in a public space and an elevator is spent to speed up people travel and save time. This really outlined the point that this interaction needed to be of a minimal time sink or, if possible, no time lost at all.

The Work Done:

This week was a long one for me. I found out that all of my team was dropping the course due to all the changes. I was quite stressed out and panicking as I had to then take the research and effort we all put in from our first meeting to create a pitch of some sort. I decided to go with a live pitch as I did not have time to put a video together. I decided I would not heavily on the research at this point in time as I did not have enough time to do it in depth by myself. I decided to focus on the implementation of the idea and how it would work and with what technologies. Below is some of the planning and props I used to do so.

After I had decided on how I wanted to pitch I put a slide pack together along with a script so that I could present on Tuesday morning.

How it Relates:

Presenting on Tuesday morning via slack LIVE was a whole new experience. It was a weird concept not being able to see anyone or visually see how they were reacting to the idea. I think I presented my pitch quite well, considering being a solo team. I did have some interesting and useful feedback that should help navigate me through conceptually narrowing down this idea and designing it. At the end of my slide pack I asked three questions:

1. Is AR Technology a suitable choice?
2. Do you expect people to be inclined to learn from a simulation like this?
3. Are there any other functions you would like to see in this?

And I received some valid feedback to guide me in the right direction. To quote some:

“Combining the sound with other technology (AR) can simulate the emergency scenarios and offer them a better learning experience. When use the phone as nav tool, I think you could take users’ different physical conditions into consideration.”

“In terms of immersion, I would argue that VR is a better option as AR lacks the same sense of depth. If that is important to the concept that is.”

“I think it would be better to focus on who you are designing for? For children/elderly people, how to teach them use the new tech... For others, how ar can better their immersive experience would be a tricky part…”

“Using Extend Reality in a home-setup will create a more immersive environment, as users are more familiar in their own environment. It will be much easier for them to practice fire evacuation plans”

Work to Do:

Based on the constructive feedback my next steps in this process is to identify the target audience, narrow down on the concept and pick the technologies I will use and for what features. I need to see if there is a way for the person to navigate around without use a phone. Everyone likes the idea of sounds to move around but I think this needs more interaction so it becomes more immersive. Someone mentioned using the heart rate as a way to make the simulation harder or easier depending on what theirs HR is. This is an interesting this to incorporate and I guess this will make people more aware of their surroundings.

Pitch reflection

Our group hand gang pitched our idea through a pre-recorded video via zoom. Both teaching staff and classmates provided really insightful and useful feedbacks. The major concern is about whether the form, hand, would be too heavy in the daily context. This is a point we did not realise before. We were focusing on how to make it sassy and innovative but not portable. This is a wearable device, the portability would be really important part of user experience.

to change it to social context, helping people to make friends. I came up with an idea is like a "hand tinder". this hand can detect who you like and if the person who the user like is approaching him it will wave to them to grab their attention. I think this could be a good solution to avoid the embarrassment that initiate a conversation . it would be definitely helpful for the introverts who want to make friend but is shy to express their emotions.

We were thinking about this "positive" side, but it's a little bit hard to find a balance between friendly and sassy. but definitely, this would be a direction we can look at.

We wanna convey the emotion and meaning via sassy gestures. But Some fellow mentioned the meaning of gesture.might not be universal , It represents different meaning in different country. My group member and I will talk about this, if we stick will the gestures things.

Zoom

It was fun to use this online meeting app, although it crashed at the middle of our class.

The most valuable things I learnt from zoom is the importance of in person teaching. This online teaching experience make me delussional, and hard to concentrate on that. I don't really feel engaged to participate into the discussion.

I think one of the most important value of this course is the physical feeling. People still value the authentic feeling, because It is much easier for us to build compassion or attachment with the physical object rather than digital stuff. Although there are many things are becoming digital, the authentic feeling is not replicable at this stage. If they will like the things they can touch they can feel in the real life.

This online studying experience might be an interesting topic I should discover in the future. why the people feel much more engaged and attached in the real world context.

Synchronized Learning research:

Since our group decided to work on synchronized learning, I have done some research on that.

brain regions

The human mind can rapidly absorb and analyze new information as it flits from thought to thought. These quickly changing brain states may be encoded by synchronization of brain waves across different brain regions.

There are millions of neurons in the brain, each producing its own electrical signals. These combined signals generate oscillations known as brain waves, which can be measured by electroencephalography (EEG). The research team focused on EEG patterns from the prefrontal cortex —the seat of the brain’s executive control system — and the striatum, which controls habit formation.

Left & right brain exercises(video):

Left & right brain exercises video 1

Left & right brain exercises video 2

Neither side of brain can function independently, both brains work and communicate with another.

how brain work

Later research has shown that the brain is not nearly as dichotomous as once thought. For example, research has shown that abilities in subjects such as math are strongest when both halves of the brain work together. Today, neuroscientists know that the two sides of the brain collaborate to perform a broad variety of tasks and that the two hemispheres

"The pop psychology notion of a left brain and a right brain doesn’t capture their intimate working relationship. The left hemisphere specializes in picking out the sounds that form words and working out the syntax of the phrase, for example, but it does not have a monopoly on language processing. The right hemisphere is more sensitive to the emotional features of language, tuning in to the slow rhythms of speech that carry intonation and stress."

brain collaboration

Temporal synchronization is believed to be the main mechanism of information binding, (i.e., segregation and integration) in the brain. Neurons in different regions of the brain get into synchrony, and as a consequence, information is processed in the brain. Synchronization phenomenon has a key role in various cognitive functions of the brain, and various brain disorders have been linked to abnormal levels of synchronization. For example, Alzheimer’s disease is often associated with loss of local and global synchronous activity between brain regions. Schizophrenia—as another cognitive impairment—is linked to altered synchronization levels in the brain. Autistic patients have also shown lower synchronization values across various brain regions compared to healthy controls.

various cognitive functions of the brain

Game-based learning:

introduction of Game-based learning video

After presentation reflection

We presented our idea through a pre-recorded video in the first session Tuesday. Our team got a lot of useful feedback. Lorna’s initial comment was where it was supposed to be and if we could transfer it into a more everyday life situation? In the break, we walked through some of the comments on slack and we continued with a few of these after the class session as well.

Some feedback focused on the context of the concept – this is maybe more of an “installation” type, rather something someone would use or engage within their everyday life. I was also thinking that we have a perfect situation to test in these times – most people are working from home and it would be interesting to move the installation home to people that now has to work online – that are not used to working online.

Some people suggested different inputs or outputs or even making this user. Some had very valid points of the fact that this idea is simplifying the complexity of emotions. Maybe we’d want to explore how we can include the complexity of emotions in this fairly simple concept.

We should also consider a more concise user group. So far we’ve been targeting most people that pass by this point, but if we move it to the homes we might wanna look at separating into for example family homes, share houses, people living alone etc. This can be good opportunities for a split in the group too, where we look at different target groups.

Day 1 of online teaching - how did it go?

I must say I'm impressed it went as well as it did with the online teaching today, although Zoom crashed. It was annoying that we are not able to use videos, as this gives a better feel of interacting with real people than just seeing the photos. The video-sharing web page worked well! I am noticing that it's gonna be hard to complete the semester like this, I actively did not sign up for online studies because I like to be there physically. But there is not much to do about that.

Inspiration

Bop it toy

The children will be able to interact with the soft toys by the following means to learn knowledge.

• Pull it
• Twist it
• Push it
• Flick it
• Smash it

The goal of the project is to promote an unique and physical interactive approach for children to learn. The design is a soft toy and a website, where the children can interact with the toy to answer the questions shown on the website.

Research

Tangibles for learning: a representational analysis of physical manipulation

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00779-011-0406-0

• The ability to integrate digital technology into physical objects—so-called ‘digital manipulatives’—has generated excitement over the potential to create new educational materials
• possible limitations of physical objects—most importantly that their symbolic significance is only granted by the context in which they are used

Training the Body: The Potential of AIED to Support Personalized Motor Skills Learning

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40593-016-0103-2

• The training process is based on the learning-by-doing approach and involves correcting the learner’s movements till her optimal movements (considering the own learner’s corporal features, specific physical abilities, performance to date as well as the particularities of the motor skills to be learnt) is achieved
• There are four main issues to be addressed:

i) sensing the movement performed by the learner

ii) modelling and comparing learners’ and experts’ movements

iii) designing the required support to give

iv) delivering the personalized support

Hands-on Learning through Tangible Interaction

http://umi-sci-ed.eu/hands-on-learning-through-tangible-interaction/

• A number of concepts behind Tangible Interaction support this, including the idea of multi-sensory interfaces and support for experimentation.
• Traditional learning techniques generally engage just two senses – hearing and vision – when providing access to information.
• Tangible Interaction promotes the concept of engaging multiple senses including vision, hearing, touch and even smell and taste as a medium for interacting with data.
• Tangible objects, by their very nature, support exploratory activities.
• This opens up the possibility for students to learn through discovery, and engage with the lesson material on a more personal and motivated level.

kids motor skills research

Factors influencing developmental delay among young children in poor rural China: a latent variable approach

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6120651/

• Overall, 35.7% of the surveyed children aged 6–35 months demonstrated suspected developmental delay.
• The prevalence of suspected developmental delay was inversely associated with age, with the prevalence among young children aged 6–11 months being almost double that of children aged 30–35 months (48.0% and 22.8%, respectively).
• Using a structural equation model, it was demonstrated that caregiver’s care and stimulus factors and child’s haemoglobin level were directly correlated, while caregiver’s sociodemographic factors were indirectly associated with suspected developmental delay.

As the course became more individual, I had to make a decision to continue the course, which I am. I'm excited for the challenge ahead and as it may not be a steady one, I hope I produce a great prototype at the other side.

In regards to my team's presentation, we all decided to continue on with the course and get through it together.

For our concept, we decided to explore Enhanced Mundane Spaces and with that, create a Dancing Elevator that gives people the chance to exercise while they are in an elevator. Our teams video is below

From here, we hope to get more user research conducted, start developing each individual outcome to focus on then go from there. To reflect, as a pandemic has forced us to not be in contact with each other as often, it would have been beneficial to communicate within the team more so then we weren't making everything last minute and we were able to have more time to check that everything was all good because I believe that we rushed it a bit.

For inspiration as our concept was inspired by the dance dance revolution mats, I found a concept that someone developed with an arduino to simulate the experience of this. The video is below.

Pitch

After we completed the google slides, I put everything into Adobe Premiere Pro.

It turns out that you cannot add an Apple produced mp4 to Premiere Pro.

Tuesday

Watched pitches.

It was great to see how teams had built off individual pitches.

Feedback

The most common feedback that we received was related to the possibility of our technology disturbing commuters.

The teaching staff suggested that we evolve Magical Points to a larger scale.

Tutor Alison and Tutor Clay misinterpreted our installation to be

Reference:

Nounproject.com

Continuing The Course

The last week has been quite a mixture of emotions, confusion and thinking about the future. With COVID-19 making a huge impact to the course, it has definitely brought upon new challenges and directions to take. Regardless, I'm still excited and ready to continue the course with all the changes to come, although am quite nervous about taking on the task with a more individual outlook as I don't feel very strongly in my programming skills.

Group Chats

Upon discovering the changes to the course, we sadly lost a team member within the group. Upon discussion with the remaining team members, we revised our initial idea of the chair as it felt like a more complex idea to create as an individual. The idea that we've come up with explores changing energy consumption habits through implementing factors of discomfort. We felt that through an individual aspect, this might be something that might be less difficult to tackle.

Research Questions

We conducted initial research questioning to collect some ideas that we could explore. The following questions and responses were recorded:

Q1. What energy consumption habits do you want to change?

• Taking shorter showers
• Using phone less
• Using and buying less plastic
• Reduce power usage at home
• If it’s too cold/hot for the dogs
• Outside door is left open
• Devices/tvs/lights left on
• Cleaning not done
• Air conditioner/heater left on

Q2. What response would bother you? (e.g. sound, light, social media shaming)

• Sounds that keep happening for a really long time
• Spamming of the same message
• High cost
• Stops them from pursuing hobbies
• Stops them from going out
• Alerts on phone
• Creates more mess
• Loud noise
• Speaking (e.g. yells ‘Help me!” when someone walks past)
• Complaining about how cold it is etc.

Q3. What form? (e.g. small box, plant, unappealing v appealing?)

• Something that is too heavy to move
• Something stuck in position
• Wetness
• Embedded in the bad habit
• Emotional connection

The Concept

Based on the responses we received, we came up with the concept of a small portable object that playfully annoys and disturbs users when they have committed a negative energy consumption habit, ie. leaving the aircon running when not present. The user will be alerted after a certain time through an annoying sound initially (potentially the ball complaining), however if they do not take any action, then it will continue to annoy them through flashing lights, vibrations and annoying sounds. The goal is that the user becomes annoyed and made to feel uncomfortable which forces them to fix the problem. Hopefully with constant annoyance, this will improve their habits of being more energy efficient at home.

Possible ways to explore and create this that were discussed were varying sensors to measure light, sound, water and movement detection. Sensors is not something that I have had much experience with however, so I'm hoping that it won't be too challenging for me. In saying that though, I'm definitely ready to step out of my comfort zone and explore something new!

We are still confused about the future of the project and our ability to be able to develop such a project with all the big changes, so hopefully after the presentations this week we will have more of an understanding and more confidence in the concept and ourselves!

Work Done

The second week was centred around the Project Inspiration presentations, and the majority of the contact hours were spent discussing and critiquing the concepts.

In the Tuesday contact, I spent the first half of the session critiquing the concepts on the sheets provided to us. I found it useful to provide feedback during the pitches, as I found myself easily distracted after the first half an hour. It was quite challenging to remain focused for such a long period of time, and so it was good to have an activity to complete rather than merely listening to the presentations. Furthermore, providing feedback and listening to questions asked by the teaching staff helped me evaluate and consider iterations to my own concept. I felt that I was able to provide valuable feedback, although I struggled to fully understand some of the concepts. Reflecting on the Tuesday sessions, I found that it was easier to provide constructive and actionable feedback in the morning in comparison to the afternoon. At some point, the feedback felt slightly repetitive and redundant which made them shorter in length and less detailed. I believe this was also due to some of the concepts having many similarities, making it hard to stay concentrated and inspired.

During the second half of the session, I completed the area induction. This induction was mainly focused on identifying any safety hazards and being cautious when using tools in the workshop. I found the session informative and safety-oriented, and I think it will be useful for the project later in the semester. Earlier in the semester I had a few concerns related to building components in our projects related to safety, and so it was assuring to have the induction as a mandatory component of the course for all students.

In the Wednesday contact, the first half of the session revolved around completing the presentations. Early in this session I presented my idea, which was outlined in an earlier blog post. I believe I presented my idea to the extent that the audience could understand the overall interaction, however I feel there was a lack of detail in how the system would respond to user input. I did not sufficiently explain that when the user succeeded in mixing the correct colour, the butterfly would fly away as an animation and move around the screen. The idea was that this would give the user a sense of achievement and reward through seeing the screen fill up with colours. Although I could have explained this aspect better, I am happy with my presentation as a whole. I am normally somewhat comfortable with speaking in front of people, however I tend to get nervous when I need to present or when I am getting assessed. This happened during my presentation, meaning I got nervous and forgot to include parts of my planned script. Considering this, I think I managed to communicate my concept in a good way in spite of my nerves. For the remainder of the presentations, I tried to provide the presenters with constructive feedback.

After everyone had presented in class, some concepts stood out to me as more memorable than others. I really liked some of the concepts presented, in particular mort. and Percussion Glove.

mort.

This concept interested me as it seemed like a very playful tool to learn language. The interaction mode was easy to integrate into everyday life whilst remaining playful and novel. I liked the use of familiar objects such as a toy for the physical interaction as this is an interesting twist on something the users would have a relationship to. This aspect of the concept inspired me to explore familiar objects and how I may include them in my concept to encourage interaction.

Percussion Glove

Percussion Glove stood out to me due to the novelty and variety in interaction. The concept could either be interacted with as an individual or with others. This inspired me to add multiple interaction forms or change my concept to add more collaboration and social interaction between users. I will look into changing my concept to facilitate multiple users simultaneously as it would be interesting how this could impact the interaction and overall experience.

During the second half of the session, we tried to identify themes among the concepts. Initially, we wrote down suggestions for themes and the associated concepts individually on post-it notes. There seemed to be some overarching themes such as mental health, musical instruments, physical exercise and behavioural change. We then attached these to butcher’s paper in order to share ideas and discuss emerging themes. Once this step was completed, we used the previous steps to ideate specific themes. Many of the themes noted on the post-it notes seemed fairly broad, and so in discussion we tried to narrow them down to be more specific. Some of the themes to emerge were ‘Creating Music Through Movement’, ‘Creating Music Visually’, ‘Individual Action for Sustainability’, ‘Negative Reinforcement for Behaviour Change’ and ‘Emotion as Input’. We found these themes to accurately describe and include a limited group of concepts whilst being specific enough to exclude the majority of concepts. I found this activity a good way to share ideas and generate themes. When completing the first steps individually, I found it quite hard to create themes which were narrow enough to only include a smaller subset of concepts. However, when we moved into a group discussion it was easier to separate these as there were more opinions and perspectives.

How it Relates

The work completed prior to and in studio has helped us ideate and come up with interesting concepts. Furthermore, the activities in class have helped us consider different aspects of our proposed ideas and inspired iterations for them. Perhaps one of the most helpful activities in the process has been providing and receiving feedback. I found this to be a good way to explore possible alterations to or variations of the project I had not previously considered without input.

Work to Do

Once the themes have been defined, I will try to explore the ones which interest me the most. Additionally, I will try and do further research on existing technology within these themes. Furthermore, I will look into the feedback from my peers and teaching staff to iterate on and refine my concept.

Work that Inspired/Interested Me

I am very interested in the domains of responsive art and immersive museums/installations, and so whilst looking for inspiration for my concept I found an immersive room filled with jellyfish projections. The installation is created by Takahiro Matsuo, and can be described as a simulation of being underwater surrounded by sea creatures. Visitors of the installations may extend their hands or move their bodies to elicit a response, e.g. pale blue jellyfish glow in pale blue. What inspired me about this installation was the calming effect it had on me and the imitation/interpretation of sea life.

https://mymodernmet.com/takahiro-matsuo-aquatic-colors/

Inspiration

This week our group mainly designed our product, which was initially named "music lab" by us. However, we later made it clear that it is a machine that can collect and use sounds from life to create new mixed sounds. After discussion, we think that music is a more professional voice. And the sound produced in daily life is not music, so, we changed its name to "sound lab". It is called a lab because our target users are non-professional sound-lovers. It is difficult to predict the final result in the process of their creation. In addition, we design the equipment used in the shape of laboratory test tubes, flask, droppers, etc., so that users can feel like doing experiments.

Our group was not satisfied with the ideas provided by the previous students, so we reviewed some materials and found some inspiration from them. Combining the theme of "producing sound" with existing ideas, we redesigned our products.

We planned to buy some test tubes, beakers and other props to shoot body storming, but due to the epidemic, the course was changed from offline to online. Two members of our group proposed to withdraw from the course. Therefore, we changed the body storming to paper prototyping because of insufficient staff.

We divided the speech in the entire 10 points into the following aspects: background introduction, concept explanation, inspiration source, persona explanation, storyboard, future work, and paper prototype to show how to use this product.

How to use

I mainly shot and produced a paper prototype and detailed on how to use it.

First of all, the tools we need are a trash can that can delete sound, some test tubes that can save sound, a flask that can mix sounds, and a dropper that can record sounds. For example, we are interested in water sounds, birds sounds, and the wind bells sound. We can record water sounds with droppers, and collect water sounds with a test tube. Then, we use the same method to collect and save bird sounds and wind bells sounds. The glowing part of the dropper represents the length of time the sound was recorded, and it changes with the length of the recording. Different sounds have now been saved in the test tubes. The height of the color in the test tube represents the length of the audio. If we forget the sound material in the test tube, we can shake the test tube to hear the saved sound. Next, we can use the sound in the test tube to create a Mixed sound. The method of creation is to select the test tubes of the sound material we want and pour the sounds from different test tubes into a flask to mix. Shake the flask, multiple sound materials will be mixed and played. Pour the sound from the flask into the trash can and the sound will be deleted.

Target audience

1. Music lovers and producers.
2. Those who are interested in daily sound.
3. Those who are sensitive to sound.

Background

People who have been living in a fast-paced, fast-paced city for a long time often have a lot of stress and will be exposed to a lot of sounds every day. There are sounds that make people feel relaxed, such as the sound of running water, the sound of leaves, the sound of car engines, the sound of kitchens. Different sounds represent different life scenes, and there are always scenes that make people feel relaxed or yearning. Although we cannot enter such a scene at any time, we can record the sound of these life scenes.

Personas

In addition, we also designed two personas.

Design feasibility

We discussed the feasibility of this design. At present, we think that the main needs are some small recording equipment and players. We will install them in test tubes, flasks. Our main interaction method is shaking. We will use SHAKE action as a way to trigger the mix. Therefore, we may need to use some sensors.