The work done:

World Cafe

In Tuesday studio, we mainly working on the world cafe activity. we are randomly put in a table with a specific topic. For each round, we try to analyse these topics and generate some new idea based on this topic and the posters that related to it. After each round, one person on this table will stay and be the host for the next round.

On the "Everyday Sustainability" group. we mainly work on how to achieve the design "Artificial conscience". This idea seems a good one but by the discussion from our group, we found that this idea(cactus) is lacking interaction to users(user will not actually interact with this conscience). so we try to add interaction, but in the end, we find that will lead this design with no meaning. (user has no reason to interact with this product)

On the "change through Reward" group. At first I think that may be very easy. However, when we to deep to discuss the meaning of "reward". For example, some thing that young people thing as "reward" may not recognize by elder people.

Team forming

on Wednesday studio, we mainly work on team forming. Based on our idea: bothering staff.

we discussed how to make a thing that really bother people.

we thought one idea that basically from tutor's suggestion. A device that using in class and meeting. It is obvious that no one should be allowed to use phone in a meeting. So if anyone do so, like send a message during the meeting, this device will automatically copy this message and send it to every one.

How it related:

The world cafe is really a good idea to generate some new product. When different people looking at the same idea, they may generate different ideas towards different areas of this idea.

However, this activity requires the host can completely tell the new members what the idea was. At the same time, it is really hard to understand what the last group of people have written done.

In conclusion, I think this kind of activity is useful in generating some basic idea. However, it may not suit for a final decision.

Work to do:

try to create three design and discuss them in group. Then chose one as proposal presentation topic.

idea_01: Noisy bookmark

A physical noisy bookmark. if you put it into a book and leave it for a long time and never read it. The bookmark will keep making annoying sounds.

idea_02: Biting box

A box that can bite a human finger. The six sides of this box look exactly the same. Only when the user touches a specific side, the other 5 sides will spring up and grab the user's finger.

(in small game?, in a bar or party?)

(may have a little electric shock?)

idea_03: A cup that cannot drink.

The user cannot drink the water in the cup. But other people can see bubbles in the glass

Concept

The design is based on things to represent, communicate and mediate emotions. The flower is designed to let user be comforted by natural plant smell and colourful lights. Users can record their thoughts or simply speak out to the flower when they are in low mood. Also, when they are clipping their hands, the flower will shine colourful lights and release natural smell to comfort them.

Research

Smell and Emotion

An experiment by [1]Weber and Heuberger (2008) exposed the effects of smells impacted on the cognitive states. The experimental participants smelled different plants and then rated the pleasantness of smell, their mood, calmness, and alertness on a scale. Compared to a controlled group, participants smelling the plants evaluated themselves more positively in mood, alertness, and calmness. However, there was a follow-up experiment that found artificial smells did not improve emotional functioning as natural effects.

A study by Pollatos et al. (2007) focused on the relationship of affective pictures, oflactory performance and sex. The sample consists of 32 subjects (16 males). Olfactory performance was examined after flowing unpleasant pictures presentation for all subjects and pleasant pictures for male subjects only. The level of pleasantness and intensity of neutral over-threshold odors is related to the valence of the picture. The odor was rated as unpleasant after viewing the unpleasant visual experience. However, positive presentation of pictures induced a significant increase in reported odor pleasantness. Besides, the results showed male may be susceptible to this cognitive and top-down influence.

[1] Weber and Heuberger, “The impact of natural odors on affective states in humans”, 2008. [Online]. Available : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18353767

[2] Pollatos et al, “Emotional Stimulation Alters Olfactory Sensitivity and Odor Judgment”, 2007. [Online]. Available:

https://academic.oup.com/chemse/article/32/6/583/317236

Technique Supports

1. High quality LEDs: super bright 2835 SMD RGB LED, waterproof, long life span (in excess of 50,000 hours). Low power consumption and environmental friendly.
2. WIFI wireless smart controller:16 million colors, smart phone control, timer mode, work with Alexa. It can also make the lights lighting with the rhythm of music in your smart phone, by using 1 App to control many Wi-Fi controllers at the same time.
3. Support for color and dynamic mode customization and preservation
4. Lights and music sync functions
5. A variety of built-in dynamic model, and the custom dynamic model

The aroma diffuser will be used to support smell function. Frangance put inside the container and smell come out from the top. The diffuser will be shaped like a green pot for flower.

Record Key: Press the button to start record the voice.

Play Key: Press the button to start playing recorded voice.

There are two control buttons, one for recording, the other for play.

The sound clear and loudly, can help you express feelings, or message tips,

The sound sensor switch is consider to control the led lights by clapping hands or speaking loud.

On Monday, the team meet up for 2 hours at Uni, despite the uncertainty of when the pitch will be done and having a one week pause. This allowed us to discuss the concept in more depth, to have a better understanding, using the ideas and notes from the discussion the night before. The meeting went well as we were able to finalise our concept and decide who would be in charge of what parts. The concept we came up with involved allowing users to create music by interacting with flat objects with a large surface area, such as a placemat. Users will then be able to interact with the objects to create sounds or tunes through manipulating natural sounds. After Monday, I worked on the introduction and aim of the concept for the pitch and started creating a draft for the presentation.

The team decided to have another meeting on Friday via zoom rather than face to face, this allowed me to learn how to use this tool as the majority of my subjects will be using it. This meeting was longer than the one on Monday as we went through the script and each person’s part. We then discussed what changes and additional information needed to be added. After this, we talked about what tasks needed to be done for the PowerPoint presentation and what was going to be on each slide. From there, it was decided that all of us would each record our parts of the pitch. The part that I was assigned to was editing the video.

What I have done, so far, is record my part and have started adding sound recordings, clips and images to the video pitch, using Adobe Premiere Pro.

Last week we got grouped into teams. My team turned out to be with Tuva, Thomas and Sigurd with the theme emotional intelligence. Already the first day we had a meeting since the pitch was supposed to be the following week. Since I was not at school that day due to a sore throat(yes I called health services and I'm safe) we had a meeting online where we determined some basics and the time for the next meeting. The following Friday we had a meeting where we did some ideation and came up with our concept. The idea surrounded a display of emotion with the users actively doing something which then would be displayed in, for instance, a colour. Also in the meeting we drafter a power point and decided who was gonna do which part. I volunteered to make some sketches and draw up a storyboard.

Because of the resent development caused by the corona virus the presentation was delayed and also made digital. I therefore recorded my part of the presentation so that my team could assemble a short video presentation instead.

I was scared for a moment that the course would be closed and that I wouldn't be able to finish my degree this semester but thankfully it is going to be made digital instead. But this also means that a lot more of the work will be done individually which means that for a lot of the part forward I will be working alone. I had some initial ideas that I could work further on that was not taken into consideration when we discussed this in the group meeting, so I do look forward to that actually. I'm both nervous and excited to see what this course have to offer in the nearby future and hopefully will be even as exciting as it seemed to be at the beginning of the semester.

Project Process

After the team formation completed, we came up with 4 ideas. Homemade sound mixer and punching bag with sound. In addition, music can be combined with shadow and color. On this basis, we have many new ideas. Finally, based on voting and analyzing the integrity of ideas, we chose sounds lab as our project.

Sounds Lab

It consists of several test tubes, a flask, a trash can and a dropper. The dropper collects sound and stores them in a test tube. If you want to mix the sound, you can pour the sound from the test tube into the flask and shake it. The role of the trash can is to remove the sound from the specified test tube or flask.

Inspiration

The idea came from a video. Both of the songs mentioned in the time commentary used some of the voices around them.

In addition, this idea also comes from the project content of other groups in the HCI class. Their project is to help users get better sleep through custom music.

Target Audience

1. Music lovers and producers.
2. Those who are interested in daily sound.
3. Those who are sensitive to sound (Good at discovering the sounds around him; the sound of a particular segment will be associated)

Storyboard and Persona

Amy (normal user)

1. She is having a picnic, lying on the grass and hearing the sound of the wind blowing the leaves. She feels happy and calm inside
2. Record the sound with a dropper and stores it when she goes home
3. lie in bed and she can't sleep. She wants to go back to that day and feel calm
4. Mix sound and uses it to fall asleep peacefully

Dennis (Professor)

1. Dennis is a professional music producer. He is out of inspiration while composing
2. He is walking on the road and suddenly attracted by a voice. He thinks the sounds can be used in his music
3. He records the sound
4. At the studio, he tries to blend new sounds with songs he has already made.
5. The new tune makes him very satisfied

Work to do

Although we have held 2 group meetings this week (determining the concept content, presentation content, and distribution of everyone's work content of presentation), and have made and filmed the paper prototype of the concept. In the next week, we will focus on the presentation. After the presentation, the concept will be modified based on the feedback given, if there are problems. After that, we need to discuss with the team members how to divide the large project into several small parts, how to implement them, and the assignment of tasks. The main purpose is to make a reasonable time and project schedule. Of course, in this process, constant discussions with tutors are needed, so that at the end of the period, the finished product can be made on time.

One of our group members has dropped out because of the effects of the coronavirus, and one of the group members is still thinking about the same issue. So in the next projects, we may face huge challenges. Therefore, next week's work is the top priority and must be taken seriously.

In this week's contact, we carried out a total of two activities.

Connection with Bash

First, Bash, a graduate from the United Kingdom, introduced us some tips about job hunting, such as the interview process and some precautions. And after that, he also gave us an event, which left me the deepest impression. He asked us to introduce ourselves, starting with "My name is XXX. I am a XXX. I am unique because XXX". After completing the filling of the words and sentences, the unequal number of words were crossed out multiple times, leaving one word in the end. The word I left is my name, because I feel that if you introduce yourself, then who you are is the ultimate one. At least someone else must know what your name is before you can understand you. But after I saw some results from other classmates, some of them left their names like me, while others left their professional (designer) and some personal characteristics, such as personality and strengths. And in the following description, the personal characteristics (the last word left) will be described in the form of storytelling.

However, I had a confusion after class. As the introduction in the class said, there should also be a key word in the portfolio, but I found this to be difficult to achieve in the actual implementation process. In the process of preparing materials in the early stage, because I have to show my previous projects in all aspects, I chose a lot of different types of materials to demonstrate my capabilities, such as UI design, User research, Prototype, and Evaluation. According to the words from Bash, it is difficult to summarize so much material into one word. So I'm thinking about whether to show it as a module. For example, pick a key feature in UI design and expand it. Of course, this expansion will not only be mentioned briefly in the portfolio, it should be more comprehensive and mainly described in the interview preparation. In this way, not only the content of the interview can be increased, but also the topics of each module can be well expressed.

At the same time, it also made me think that there should also be a keyword in the overall interface of making portfolios, such as simplicity and intuitiveness. You can make more use of the progress bar. But there is still a problem here, everyone feels differently about the progress bar. For example, I think that when a person can make a website independently, the progress bar of the webpage production can reach 4/5; but others think that the technology and language used in the process of making webpages This is the main criterion for scoring. What criteria should be used to spend the progress bar is a question. I think of a way to make a web page and show the technology and the effect it has formed. But if you do this, the content of the entire portfolio will be particularly large. There is a lot of content in this introduction, which is not particularly important. So in the future, I should find a better way to show the intuitiveness and simplicity of portfolio.

World Cafe

Before class, all the students' creative ideas were divided into 17 groups, and I participated in 7 of them in this event, namely beautify the self, emotional totems, musical metrics, guided movement, digital sensations, creative Learning and ability-centric interactions. During the discussion, some of my classmates' creative ideas made me particularly interesting.

In the guided movement, we discussed that there are two types of guidance, voice and limb. The development of voice guidance is very small, while the guidance of limbs has a great potential development trend. The limb does not necessarily represent the body, it may also be an extension of the limb, such as the shadow. We discussed a game-based concept that requires multiple players. One person moves and the teammates step out of the maze through shadows. Although this idea doesn't involve any special interaction method, it really makes me like it. This reminds me of a game that people in China often play. The participant was unable to speak, expressed a word in body language, and tried to get his teammates to guess. This type of interaction between two people through actions can not enhance the interaction between the two people, but also make the whole process very interesting. If this method is applied to technology, the overall user participation will be greatly improved. For example, a participant passes on the words that his teammates use to his body in the same way, until the last person is displayed in front of a machine. This machine can recognize the similarity of actions and score based on the similarity (the higher the similarity, the higher the score).

There is a concept in "beautify the self" that is similar to the function of getting up the alarm. But this approach is really disgusting. Another annoying way is that you can't turn off the alarm. For example, there is a device that can run long when you are about to touch it. This can not only be applied to getting up, but also very helpful for changing habits. For example, you can't eat some food while you are managing your diet. So put these foods on this device, and when you can't stand to eat, the device will run around with food, so you can't get it. Although the experience of this device is not good, it is the most effective way. Based on this problem, I was thinking, when users feel obvious discomfort and disgust about a certain behavior, what are the ways to balance them, or just give up. As far as getting up, some time ago, there was an app on the market to help people get up. After setting the alarm, you cannot turn it off when the alarm goes off. You can turn off the alarm only if you answer 5 math questions consecutively. This idea is really good, but when I use it, I definitely feel bored, although I am completely awake after turning off the alarm. Therefore, I was thinking that there might be a way to awaken people more gently, such as through physical conditioning or physical habits. Although I don't have any good ideas yet, using the original physical habits to change another one is a feasible direction that can be expanded.

Today we had our official first meeting as a team. We have managed to come up with an idea that helps to create an interactive learning experience for children with learning disabilites.Due to modern technology these days, children are incorporating less motor skills to learn and play in their daily lives and based on our own research, we learnt that tangible interaction promotes the concept of engaging multiple senses as a medium for interacting with medium content.

Dicussion

We discuss on various design that might help incorporate motor skills to allow for a syncrhonized development of the brain. One of the design was a resemblence of a shape shorter box where it allows kids to learn how to put in the correct shapes into the hole. If they manage to put the right shape into the correct spot, the hole will light up "green" and the voice projector will say "good job!" where as if they put the shape into an incorrect hole the voice projector will say "Opps, try again!". We thought about it and find that this design is too mundane and it doesn't require kids to have a lot of interactive inputs, therefore, we decidedto drop this idea.

Main Idea

We wanted to create something that is cute for the kids to play with and we have the idea of using a teddy bear. The name of this is bear is "Itsy" and it helps kids to incoporate motor skills to learn simple math. We are trying to target kids in general but mainly for children with learning disabilties. Itsy will be connected to a web platform where math questions will be posted on the platform. There will be a voice projector on Itsy which will tell the kids if they got the correct answers. The ear of Itsy will light up "Green" for correct answer or "Red" for Wrong answer.Itsy will have different interactive outputs which will be a little challenging for kids but it helps them to learn better.

Challenges

We want to try to incorporate voice detection on Itsy it can detect kids voices. However, speech recognizer only recognize only up to a few numbers of commands. We might look into other means of interaction medium and also more indepth research on what kind of learning is better for kids with learning disabilities

We had an online team meeting Sunday evening, and went over all our ideas and refined them to a clearer concept. It was a bit unsettling to then get an email cancelling all classes this week, and making our preparation time uncertain. We decided to proceed as though we would be presenting on Tuesday as planned, just in case, but it was definitely a confusing time.

We met in person on Monday morning, and even though we were prepared to get the presentation ready for the next day, it was certainly a bit of a relief to get an extra week. We definitely hope to produce a higher quality presentation now that we have extra time to work on it. During our Monday meeting we managed to all get on the same page with our concept moving forward, as even though we were communicating through text and voice calls, it's definitely easier to sort things out in person. We decided to focus our project on objects that are mostly large and flat, purely from a feasibility standpoint, as we assumed our concept would be much more difficult to implement on a smaller object. We also shared out our different roles in preparing for the presentation, and set up another meeting for Friday.

I was a bad team member at our Friday meeting, and slept in and was late. We opted for a Zoom meeting, and used screen sharing to finalise the script and storyboard the video. We decided on who would contribute to which parts of the video, and I was tasked with creating the object 'sounds', provide video for one of the example scenarios, and record voice-over for my part of the script. I felt really bad about being late for the meeting, so I've spent most of the last two days focusing on getting my parts done well ahead of time.

I'm a little nervous to see how the course will progress with the new online delivery and the alterations to assessment. I do want to try and stay with this course though, and maybe I'll be able to learn some new skills now that I won't be as reliant on my team for the project.

In Review

Well, it has been a very interesting week to say the least. I think it can be summed up as uncertain and overwhelming.

That being said, I am incredibly grateful for the teaching team. Reimagining the structure of this course to facilitate the ever changing advice being delivered would be no easy feat. So, thank you. I have been looking forward to taking this course ever since I learnt of its existence and it means a lot to be able to keep on keeping on.

Concept Development

My team have still been developing our concept - Twisted, and have been figuring out Zoom as we go. We have continued our research into the chosen domain of creative learning while mapping our what our video pitch will look like.

Personas, story boards, system sketches and pitches have been in the works and is starting to come together really nicely.

To date, the concept relates to a creative learning tool which facilitates problem solving and active collaboration through teaching colour theory to primary students.

A concept sketch can be seen below

Inspiration

Granted - this probably isn't the most relevant inspiration to an sci-fi coloured creature concept, but I have had a bit more time on my hands this week than usual. I was looking through my portfolio for graphic design and found some old inspirational imagery from one of my favourite graphic deisgners - Beau Bertens. He is this Dutch artist that is all for the evocative. The colours, the type face ... just everything!! I am always so drawn to his work because of his incredibly distinctive style.

I think that might be what has inspired me to write about him in this journal. I want the designs I work on, whether they are in a team or individual endeavours, to have something uniquely 'me' about them. Next step is finding out what I want to be synonymous with.

Zoom discussion for the course

Due to the impact of COVID-19, this week was paused to leave time for the teaching team to convert the course to the online one. So, there was no contact session in this week, but in order to clarify the new content of this course and gather students’ opinions on how to better move this course online, Lorna scheduled a zoom meeting for the open discussion. During this session, we were provided with the chance to get to know more about how the remaining academic weeks of this course will be conducted. Also, we received some feedback from Lorna and tutors through asking questions and the chatting room in Zoom.

Team progress

In this week, our team first had an online meeting and kept the continuous discussion through our group chat. As we have assigned different roles and decided to present our initial concept through pre-recorded video, each team member made the PowerPoint slides of their part for the upcoming pitch session and recorded their videos. Due to the adjustment of the team project and assessments, we also discussed the initial plan about how we will move forward to the final delivery and how we will take the individual responsibilities for completing the project, but still work in a team manner. That means we could still work towards a same goal, but everyone has a clearer individual role.

Individual progress

Followed the instructions provided by the teaching team, we chose to present our idea through video, so in this week, I mainly made the slides for my designated parts of this pitch: Intended Experience & Operations (Body storming for demonstrating some interactions). For the first part, I made two new images to show the ‘bracelets’ and ‘multi-user mode’ aspects of our concept. In order to offer users the immersive interaction experience, we decided to add the ‘bracelet’ for users to receive the physical feedback (vibration) from the game.

In order to give audience a clearer picture of the interaction part of our concept, our team chose to use the ‘body storming’ method to show some aspects of the interaction. So, for my own parts, I recorded the PowerPoint slides and the body storming part respectively, and then I edited these two videos together to make it easier for our team leader to organise each one’s video.

Improvement

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

World Cafe

On the Tuesday of the third week, we had world coffee. We divided the topics we summarized last week into four or five different tables with a moderator. Each group discussed the corresponding topics around different tables, and the concepts of the corresponding topics were placed on each table, and the discussion was conducted by the moderator.

I feel this kind of form is very good, in understanding the ideas and concepts of each topic, I put forward my opinion and discuss with everyone. Such full concept communication enables me to have a comprehensive understanding of each topic, and when I am the host, I use my understanding to tell the story to others and deepen my understanding of the topic during this period.

In the subsequent voting process, each person has three votes, representing different degrees of tendencies and different times. I mainly leaned towards the body as controller, and then I voted for it.

The first session was the World Cafe, where we were presented the themes for the project based on the previous week's presentations, and spent time in groups discussing and exploring the themes further. Afterwards, we indicated which themes we were interested in working in for the rest of the project.

I generally enjoyed the World Cafe session, and I particularly liked getting to spend time with a lot of different people and hearing a lot of different viewpoints, but it was a bit confusing and frustrating at times. Because it was such an open-ended discussion prompt, it was sometimes difficult to focus the discussion on new areas and explore the theme beyond what had already been done. For example, I found that in some groups, people were very focused on building on the concepts from Week 2 that were presented as part of that theme, whereas I was more interested in looking at areas not covered by the concepts, and new ways of interpreting and looking at the theme.

Also, because of the structure and time constraints of the session, we all really only got to experience at most 5 or 6 themes, and when it came time to put our preferences out, I skipped over some themes simply because I didn't really know anything about them. It would have been nice to get some more time to explore more of the themes on offer.

Themes I Discussed:

Guided Movement

Musical Things

Enhancing Mundane Spaces

Change through Reward

Musical Metrics

In session 2 I was most nervous about finding out teams and who I would be working with for the rest of the semester. I was pretty happy that I got my first choice of theme, 'Musical Things', and I'm also pretty happy with my team. We are the only team of 5 in the studio, which worries me a little as there may be higher expectations around the amount of work we should be able to do because we have an extra person. I know 2 of my team quite well already, and the other 2 seem quiet and shy but willing to put in the effort, so I feel confident we will work well.

We spent our time in the session deciding on a more concrete concept to work on within the theme. We are the only team working in our theme, so we didn't have any restrictions or worries about overlap, but that almost made it more difficult to choose. We decided to focus on turning everyday objects into musical instruments, with the aim of engaging users who aren't necessarily musical themselves, to give them the experience of making music. We ran out of time in the session, so we posed 3 questions that we would each consider individually, then meet up in a group call later on the weekend to brainstorm and finalise our concept for presentation.

The three questions were:

• Which object we would focus on turning into a musical instrument
• What type of sounds it would make, e.g. musical, percussive, unexpected
• What kind of interactions users could do with the object

Parts of DECO3801 last year focused on the idea of failing fast, the thought that to know whether your idea is successful or not, you're sending it out into the real world early, and often, because early mistakes can be corrected before you get too heavily invested in an idea. Essentially, catching problems early means the difference between having to 2.0 an idea to start again, or being able to wing it and have something fitting the Architect's Vision in your hand immediately.

Speaking of winging it, there's a risk, ... a margin of idea motion (if that makes sense), of changes and adjustments I think one can make, before the projects find themselves being a blazing barrel bizzarely blasting through stratosphere, slowly angling straight downwards into oblivion. Failing fast is meant to be something that gently nudges you away from that reality... but too much "failing" can end up feeling like all options have been exhausted, and only a half hearted compromise is left.

We're still investigating and trying to figure out what we can do for the presentation next week but privately, I've been reviewing ideas I've had before even sharing them with my group - at which point, well, it's sounding ridiculous as I say it, but maybe the ideas need a chance to get a breath of air before I declare them to be explosive rockets headed for the abyss.

With the things I've managed to create recently, be it a Digital Musical Instrument thats supposed to simulate a baton that plays music - or a tool to teach medical students how to identify different stages of cancer progression... it's certainly felt like I shot for the stars with the possibilities.

But well, as evidenced by how I haven't talked about these unique design opportunities yet - theres a lot to break down with regard to how they went. I would say that I failed, but it's more nuanced that that, they were just succesful in unusual ways - things that made them cool as ideas, but were personally unsatisfying to me.

But that ambition being so large and subtly pushing the idea toward imperfection... is hard to come to terms with. The Architect's Vision specifies a pretty particular thing, and failing fast would mean that theres chances for that vision to be denied. You realise small parts that need to be adjusted often, and eventually, the vision shifts to accomodate compromises. So much so that its essentially a different idea altogether.

Looking back at some of my thoughts on Bash's Q&A, perhaps something I'd not considered fully aside from the variety of the work, simply having a lot of stuff out there, a lot of small failures telling you something about different spaces, gives you a chance to mastermind something new out of their ashes that couild only have come from a combination of failures leading up to it.

But well, I dont want to only feel like I'm failing... sure, theres lots of success, but success is expected. I think performance metrics, as a student, as a business etc, means that you cant just not put a number on things either. Maybe the way forward is simply better categorisation, sure you got a 3 on that, but a 7 on this, which is good.

Well, provided I can address my binary perception. As it is, something that's a 9 is basically a 0 to me, because it's still imperfect. Theres no such thing as something that cant be improved, but this... inability to accept anything less than flawlessness from my own efforts is going to continue to be an issue.

Thought Train

• More coherent reflections would be better
• Might want to consider a little longer at drafting instead of just putting this out stream of conciousness
• Investigate David C Roy's kinetic sculptures to see how the Engineer and Architect can be the same person

Our team had a ZOOM meeting on Monday to discuss our ideas and try and consolidate a concept for our pitch proposal. Our topic is creative learning and we decided to break down the topic into various educational themes. For example: music, learning, sports, brain training, motor skills, language, STEM etc. As a team we broke off over last weekend and started to brainstorm some of our own individual ideas for the topics to then bring back to the team.

During the meeting we had some very good discussions on various ideas, merging of some ideas and technologies to make a super concept. From the gathered brainstorm of ideas and inspirations we narrowed it down to two ideas: “Save the House” and “Deep Diving Simulator”. The fire safety concept was suggested as an essential skill, but knowledge of how to effectively put out fires is not always taught. The idea is an installation which teaches people how to safely put out fires depending on the type of fire. The idea is intended to be a fun experience and can implement a collaborative nature like the game overcooked, where a team must effectively communicate to out fires. Fires would be simulated using lighting systems, and the users would have a set of physical tools to help them put out fires. For this idea i suggested we could use auditory navigations to enhance the experience of the user and immerse them in a fire scenario. We all agreed it would be a great idea to create scenarios using our other senses than sight.

The deep diving simulator was suggested first as an educational tool to teach divers how to hold their breath before they begin diving. But then after some careful discussion and other topics about climate change and environmental issues coming up we thought this would be interesting to teach the general public about diving in the Great Barrier Reef but they don't actually have to dive there. This installation aims to be a diving simulator and aims to train one of the most crucial techniques of diving, breathing and a consistent heart rate. This could be used in conjunction with a VR headset to truly immerse the users in the underwater world. It would be a good thing for tourism and reducing footprint on the reef.

After much discussion we decided to go with the Fire Safety theme and try and flesh that out some more. Over the next week we are all tasked with doing some background research on fire safety, causes of fires, Statistics, Strategies of extinguishing fires, Previous installations or ways of spreading this information. We also want to look into possible technologies we could use for tracking, simulation and existing attempts.

Video Call - Bash

I enjoyed the video call from Britain as Bash had some excellent advice. Although I was already familiar with the information that he gave, having spent countless hours looking at employability before, I still enjoyed hearing about his story.

Team Formation

I wasn't too surprised with the team I received given that I tried to team up with people I know can do good work by putting my notes close to those I'd like to work with rather than the most exciting theme. This decision is a result of previous semesters where I've been in teams where a couple of us have to pull the weight of other group members. Given that I'm doing my thesis, I can't afford yet another semester where I have to spend enormous amounts of energy and time making up for the shortcomings in other people's work, as my thesis progress took a significant hit last semester. The negative aspect of this is that this team will have similar input to me given our same cultural backgrounds, whereas the positive side is that I know they can all do great work. I believe our group will be fully capable of producing a captivating concept and have a lot of fun while doing so. I hope that, in this course, we can focus on ideas that are more physical than digital as I'm interested in learning more than just web and app design.

The first thing our team did was to sit down and write up a team agreement, with one team member joining us on Discord. After the class, we decided to have a meeting to start ideation. There, we discussed the theme, emotional intelligence, and produced as many ideas as we could. We chose to focus on two aspects, input and output, whether they should be internal or external, physical or digital, and how they could be combined. After coming up with some initial ideas, we opted to plan a meeting for Friday to choose one concept to move forward. Previous to the meeting, we were all to come up with two additional ideas.

My Two Ideas

Thomas and I sat down to ideate a couple of ideas on a train ride back from a friends house. The first concept I ideated is a wristband that senses when you fidget with it, as one often can do when bored, making the device glow brighter to show your boredom and promoting human interaction. The second idea was the 'shrieking box', which you throw as hard as you can into the air. The further and faster it travels, the more loudly it shrieks, emphasising the emotions of the pitcher.

Friday's Meeting

After having presented and discussed our additional two ideas, we tried to look for combinations between them and the ones we came up with, in the previous ideation session. We chose to pursue the high-level concept of angry birds of emotions. This concept combines the emoji balls, different coloured balls with emoji faces to throw at people, from the first ideation session with a physical Angry Birds like game. We explored various input and output methods for the concept, amongst others, including sounds in the emoji balls from the shrieking box idea; Filling up different emoji balloons to visualise emotional output from the first ideation session, and many more. What we realised is that we have a lot of great ideas for input and output, and should conduct user interviews to narrow down to the best options.

After coming up with a concept to present, we started to put together the presentation and divided tasks amongst ourselves. Thomas and I were supposed to create a storyboard, Marie was to make illustrations, I was to make a visual theme for the presentation and Tuva put together most of the presentation. Moreover, we planned to have an additional meeting on Monday to finalise our presentation and rehearse ahead of the pitch on Tuesday, however, due to uni closing down a week, we postponed the meeting in case the format of the presentation would change.

This week we have done exercise “The world café” base on the topics that have been generated. The purpose of the activity is that makes students sit and do brainstorm together to let us understand each topic better and to inspire us by the posters that have done and other student’s ideas that have been come up in the activity. After finished ‘The world café’ activity, we can easy to choose the topic that we are interested in working as the domain in the team project.

The activity separate to three-round, context, audience/domain and refine respectively. The main purpose in the round one-context is to make us get a general understand of the topics and to draw from theme inspiration. We discussed the posters on the base of the topic and summarized the concept of posters in this step. The second round tries to make the student get deep thinking of posters and the topics about the user, context, reason, and value of the design. We gathered all the information on the posters related to the ‘wh’ questions on the teaching screen which is used to lead us to think more about how to develop the topic. In round three, it mentioned the way to realize the design, we also developed more concept base on the topic in this round.

After ‘The world café’ activity, I find that I’m interested in making musical instruments and a broad topic ‘body as controller’. I have thought about the new type of music instrument before meeting group members, however, I had been told to work on ‘body as controller’. We use the time on the course to know the teammate but haven’t decided on the working area of the team project on the course, but working on it together on the weekend.

ideation

In the Wednesday session, each person was assigned to a different group. We were divided in 17 topics, I was assigned to the emotional totem group. In class, I met my team members, and we saw the materials related to our design topic (the project we designed before). We summarized the key points of previous design schemes and classified them. We did research through these points, and each team member made a design plan. After this, we will be everyone's design scheme together, made a new preliminary design scheme.

World coffee

In the last week, every one presented their inspirations. Besed on previous presentation, ideas were divided into 17 different topics.

● Beautify the Self

● Change through discomfort

● Altered Landscapes

● Enhanced mundane spaces

● Everyday sustainability

● Musical things.

● Emotional totems

● Musical metrics

● Emotional intelligence

● Sassy tech

● Guided movement

● Bothersome tech

● Change through positive reinforcement

● Digital sensations

● Creative Learning

● Body as controller

● Ability-centric interactions

six people sit on a table to discuss a topic of them, we need to list related point words of this topic. For example, we need to think about, what kind of target audience they are designed for. The students discussed the problem together and listed the results of the discussion on the paper. With the discussion on different topics from different perspectives, we got to know more about the content of related topics and the meaning of the design, which gave us a better understanding of the future design topics.

This week has started interestingly. Our team went away after class, and we each thought about the concept. Last Friday, we each shared our thoughts on the concept. Most of us certainly liked the idea of creating music with any sort of everyday object - most commonly a pen or an eating utensil. Another team member also mentioned the use of gloves in creating music, however I believe it was something that's not very original (because I know of students who had created the concept in DECO2300 Digital Prototyping), and strayed a bit from our concept of everyday things. With the idea of eating utensils, I brought up the issue of table etiquette, since within my Asian culture my Asian friends and I grew up pretending to play the drums on my rice bowl with chopsticks (how could I not?), but I would get scolded any time I tried.

While our ideas were a bit different to each other, I think the discussion was good with the diverse ideas and perceptions that each of our team members brought to the conversation. We then organised a team meeting for the Monday, and chose to still meet up despite the university shutting down for the week.

Pitch Plan

We planned to meet at uni at 9am. Two of the team members arrived late, which reminded us we needed to clear up and sign off our team agreement.

We started off with discussion about the different ideas we had, and promptly sketched out what our concept would be. Before getting any of the pitch done, we needed clarity on the concept we were going to approach. It was agreed that we would be using some sort of object to be producing music, but we needed clarity on what exactly the “music” would be. In the previous week, we’d outlined it as being some of these categories

• Ambient noises of nature
• The natural and organic sounds of the object
• Tunes and actual music that is emitted according to the movements of the user

This round, we went into more detail about how the audio might be pre-recorded, most likely with tunes rather than the natural sound of an object against a surface (since that could be rather dull, and the feedback time would be rather laggy). I brought up the idea of possibly introducing unexpected sounds, but looking back on it now, it wasn’t a great idea since it would become rather bothersome in everyday use, especially since we couldn’t think of any reason to incorporate that feature. We looked at the duration of sound, and furthermore the variables for which the different kinds of audio are dependent o - we established contact duration, and motion (e.g. strokes) as base examples, but explored them further in our pitch document.

The drawings below it are a visualisation of our ideation. We discussed whether we wanted the concept to be more feasible or interesting, and chose to go with a more feasible approach, while explaining in our presentation that we weren’t sure about which direction to go in, with the hopes that our classmates might provide some extra feedback. The more feasible approach we considered was to use large surface areas as opposed to smaller objects. This would mean placemats, desks, and whiteboards (which I’ve mentioned multiple times - I don’t know why I’m so fond of whiteboards). Users are then able to use /any/ everyday object to interact with this surface, which is much more feasible than trying to create a device that works with an object as small as a pen. Furthermore, it appeals to the initial focus we had to include all everyday objects, which I believe also encourages the use of it, as it is more accessible than something that may be a completely foreign object that isn’t properly integrated into people’s everyday lives.

Moving onto our document, we began outlining the parts we needed to include in our pitch - using the assessment brief and brainstorm sketch to refer to. We broke our pitch down into 4-5 different categories:

1. Introduction and Aim of Concept

• In here, my team mate Maria introduced the team, what theme we were focusing on and what our concept was. She covered the purpose of the concept, and a summary of the interaction and example users.

2. Interaction

• A team mate and I wrote this section separately and combined our paragraphs, describing the basic logistics of the interaction of the proposed concept, and the different ways a user may interact with it.

3. Scenarios/Example Users

• In this section, a team mate covered example users and scenarios in which they might use the product. In my opinion, I feel a more in-depth description of the actual people rather than the scenarios they may use it would have sufficed, but I was concerned with my own tasks since it hadn’t been completed at the same time as the rest of the script.

4. Future Development and End Goal

• We described our end goals as both a team and as individuals, and where we would ideally take this concept.

5. Concerns (Extra)

• We included this small section so we could make brief mention of the extra concerns we had, since I personally think we had/have a lot of uncertainty about the project. Through discussion, we learnt that we shared the same concerns - regarding the feasibility of the project, and how we would manage on our own.

Furthermore, since we had assigned each person to each section of the script, we also roughly assigned the different roles. I was in charge of doing illustrations, two team mates for editing the video or presentation (which was undetermined at the time, due to the uncertainty of the university’s status), each of us doing audio, and some other roles.

I think we'd made a good start on our project, and we set milestones for deadlines for each of our parts. We planned to reconvene online in a few days, to check everyone's progress, then set another date to have a proper online meeting.

From experience, only setting a meeting or deadline, and not having a "check up" date always ended badly, since we'd realise on the day that some team members hadn't done any work - whether that was because they'd forgotten, they weren't sure what to write about, or they didn't have to time. I think it also motivated me to actually get something done, since as much as I was checking my team member's progress, they were checking mine too. It also ensured that each of us knew what we were doing, and if we needed any help, that point before the actual online meeting would ensure we had something sufficient by the date.

Online Meeting

We had an online meeting via zoom, which was certainly interesting. It was a bit slow to begin with, as we originally wanted to clear up the content we had written, but two sections hadn’t been completed, so we worked on them together as a team. Setting our check up deadline and our actual deadline wasn’t as effective as I’d hoped it would be, but it was definitely better than having a single one, so we chose to continue using it. Our planned two hour meeting went on for 4 hours, but we managed to get a lot of work done, which I am happy about. I suggested we made a storyboard, so we broke the script down in smaller paragraphs, and drew up the frames accordingly. I used the whiteboard feature on zoom and my Surface with the stylus to draw up all the frames. We all used our mics and it was a very collaborative effort. Going through each of the frames, I made sure my team members knew what was being illustrated so everyone was on the same page, and I think we had a very good discussion, and honestly a very fun time too. While I was doing most of the drawing, my team members utilised the annotation feature, which is how George came to be. I didn’t draw him, and I won’t say who did - just please believe me when I say those are his hands.

We distributed the work amongst ourselves, with consideration to what we enjoyed and what we believed we were capable of, which naturally came up in our discussion. Joy and Kelsey were to record the video parts, I was to draw the sketches, Elva animate them, and Maria to create a powerpoint presentation and bring everything together. We broke the script down (as shown in the image below), with the paragraphs numbered so that we could name our audio files accordingly to ease the editing process. We again set several milestones, to ensure our individual content was completed, with enough time for Maria to combine all the different elements, and upload it to Youtube well before the submission time. I was very happy with the work we completed in this session.

So why not prepare things ahead of time instead?

We may be in a bit of a time capsule being here in week (null), but that doesn't mean there still isn't a chance to think through what we're really going to do haha!

I went over some of the discussion the group has had over the weekend, and took the liberty of making notes of what happened. The actual intent is to catalogue what has happened - it's easy to lose track of where we've been, especially after an unexpected break that comes immediately after putting the pedal to the metal.

• Planktons computer wife from the cartoon, Spongebob Squarepants - and what made that character sassy?
• sarcasm and dry humour
• non reactions, not very emotional, very task oriented
• rarely relying on facial expressions, it was the tone of voice that made that sassy
• maybe more of an example of verbal sass, with physcomp, we need something that also looks sassy too, preferably
• taking a look at the adorable tiny robots Alonso made, there's clear,
• Alonso Martinez's robots - very cute tiny robots that sit on the desk
• More importantly, built with a philosophy of having a personality trait or several
• for example, bouncing on the desk, or being a tiny creature that you can interact with
• while theres lighting inside Mira - and gaze detection too... those actually kinda took away from the main appeal, the initial simplicity
• Perhaps its worth it to nail the look and feel (the persona?) of the technology before designing it?
• but emotional goals are going to be interpreted differently by different people... what if people think it looks uncanny?
• Some key ideas that might be useful
• a meaningful physical interaction that is laborious and or memorable
• like cranking a hand shaft to operate drawing software
• some manner of feedback from the system that could make you step back and think about what's happening
• Perhaps teaching software that sasses you by interrupting or messing with your learning?
• show you the perspective of differently abled people
• the idea that something out of their control affects their performance, but they still get yelled at anyway
• Causing chaos through technology by exploiting social conventions
• what if technology made you interact with different people?
• dad bot, always disappointed in you
• some sort of intervention for socially awkward people?
• What counts as being sassed, vs being annoyed?

• Technology that follows you around and sasses or interrupts specific interactions
• like a wall of eyes that follows you around, accompanied by a shopping card that deliberately brakes its wheels to stop you from grabbing junk food
• in a way, technology bullying you
• perhaps the bullying could serve a purpose?
• what if for every decision you make in person, some piece of technology gets right up in your face and asks you why you made your choice?
• in some ways, this is basically how some marketing surveys from online retailers can be pretty aggressive
• Animal mimicking technology
• and also, animating technology
• how should a piece of technology fold up, deploy, move, etc?
• move away from static PC's and such
• The three laws of robotics
• From Isaac Asimov's novels
• some robots in fiction sacrifice themselves for people, because peoples lives are perceived to be more valuable
• what if we had an interaction built around robotrules, and breaking or disabling them?
• At some points, perhaps text discriptions are unnecessary?
• maybe a focus on just the detail, the image in one's mind of the interaction is enough to go off of?
• The boxing robot that taunts you for example, being trash talked while sparing with it is very easy to visualise, so maybe the interaction would be easier to recall too?

Thought Train and Carriages

• alright, we have all this, maybe drafting or illustrating them will be helpful
• picturing and storyboarding things can vastly change an interaction, you can see... stress points by "drawing the next few frames with your mind"sorta
• uncertain what happens if I've lost the