Review the poster

Through world cafe, I realized that I only focused on the form of this interactive installation, and ignored that every idea needs to meet some conditions. To be honest, I don't want to give up this idea, because I think it is very creative to make Low-resolution display with umbrella, so after the world cafe, I rethought the idea.

In Blackboard, There are summarized 17 different topics. I think my idea fits the theme of "Enhanced mundane spaces". In my presentation, I mentioned the use of Ultrasonic sensor to calculate the distance between people and the facility, And it will carry on the corresponding opening and closing movement along with the user's body movement.

However, I think I was in a wrong way to complete this poster. I have re-think the whole installation. Being an installation, It must fitting into the everyday life. It may can do something for people by using some simple and specific way. Several things we need to think, How the interaction could change over the time, How the installation can encourage commuters to talk to each others, and how the installation can remind people or give some information to them.  In addition, I also think maybe there are some interactions can encourage them to do something to maintain health.

So, I add some functions, like Deep breathing by following the changing of the umbrella grows and shrink like Apple Watch.

When the bus gets closer to the station, the umbrella will gradually shrink. Now, If there are more than two commuters play together, It can give them some different Interaction animation by controlling the umbrella.

World cafe

Video:

Bash told us about his experience and gave us much advice on how to get a job, such as building network and finding recruiters. We also had to write 50 words about ourselves，find the uniqueness of ourselves and finally choose one word to summarize. It was a quite meaningful activity, I haven' t thought about my uniqueness before and I end up with using "optimistic".

Team:

After the video chat session, we formed our group. I was excited to be a member of "half ice no sugar". We were going to work on the theme of "creative learning". We started to think about our concept after we know each other. We were interested in the concept "Morse code" and we had explored this concept, thinking about making a language learning platform. Fardeen also introduced a game called 'Bop it' to us. It is a game designed for kids with multiple inputs. And we were going to design a game which also has multiple inputs like 'Bop it', for example, use pull, twist, push, flick, smash as inputs which allow kids to develop their synchronized learning ability.

In class activity:

Our project ideas had separated into different themes, and we were divided into different groups to further explore these themes. And I had been working on sassy tech, bothersome tech, creative learning, and the body as controller. These are all very interesting themes, we had explored the target users for these themes and developed more new concepts based on that.

This activity not only helped me get familiar with different themes and concepts but also let us get to know other students. After that, I decided to choose creative learning as my first preference and bothersome tech as my second preference, since I thought people are willing to learning things in an interactive way. And bothersome tech was a quite interesting area, my friends and I have come up with many interesting ideas on that.

Tuesday

World cafe

In the world cafe, we have developed a variety of ideas.

round 1 context

round 2 audience & domain

round 3 refine

In the first two rounds, we tried to broaden our thinking and think of more possibilities for the theme. In the third round, we started to chose an attractive idea to refine it. I post these results below.

In fact, in the process, I felt that I had misunderstood many concepts, which affected the progress of our third round. Each round is only 15 minutes, which is not enough for discussion. I need more time to think about topics that interest me.

After the world cafe, I have chosen the aspect of body control as my favorite theme.

Wednesday

Mobile sharing

In Wednesday's contact, a graduate from UQ shared his interview experience. He pointed out the importance of self-introduction. The unique personality can attract others to hire you.

The sentences like:

My name is...

I am unique because...

can help us describe ourselves.

Team formation and ideation

After that, I had the first meeting with my team members. We have shared our contact details and build our team chart quickly. And we also have started generated our initial concept based on the inspirations from our classmates and brainstorm.

Brainstorm

As you can see, we tried to expand our thoughts. Because our theme is related to body control, we listed the composition of the body and what it can do. We want to create an interesting interaction by doing this. And also, we found some inspirations from the internet and add some themes we want to explore more in the future.

Future work

We plan to narrow down our ideas and prepare for the presentation next week. We will use the concept map to find the ideal concept and develop it more detailed.

Contact Reflection

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The Tuesday contact section conducted a world cafe activity to make us know every theme deeper and also gave us the chance to generate more inspirations. The most impressive theme for me is creative learning. The hoster introduced the modified case to us, which adds a new function allowing multiple players.

From the discussion, I found there are three main considerations about the theme - Learning what, How to learning it and the level of entertainment. There is a correlation between the three elements, like more novel the way and stuff we learn, the higher level of entertainment it will be. Therefore, for this theme, it is necessary to avoid the traditional educational methods and targets, for example, learning language through an application. All three considerations have effects on the motivation of users, so it is a big concern on how to build a system that can both attract interests rapidly and keep users learning constantly.

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The Wednesday contact section invited Bash to have a presentation about his experience to get a job and what should we prepare for the interview. His advice and experience are really helpful and constructive, like the detail about how to garner trust from the interviewer and make the whole process easier for them. Finding a job always be a challenge, especially, it is my last semester. I know the process of role transition is never easy, but hopefully, everything will be alright at the end of the day.

UQ Innovation

This week, I've joined the UQ Innovation tutorial, the staff shows us how to use the machines in UQ makerspace, including woodcutter, laser cutter, etc. Though I've been to UQ makerspace in last semester, I didn't get a chance to use these machines. This tutorial just offered an opportunity to get started. During this tutorial, we also learned some safety protection while using this lab, and some software before we start to print by using laser cutters like Adobe Illustrator and AutoCAD. Now I know that, if I want to finish this project well, there are still lots of things to learn about, especially those areas I am not familiar with.

Team X

This week, I have met with my group members. We have a discussion and agree to follow Tianyi's previous idea and develop it, add more functions and interactions to make it more playful. The rough idea was to add more types of reactions except for music, like light, vibrate, etc. Also, more exercise equipment combined with multiple sensors can be included in this design, to increase the form of interactions.

World Cafe

Round 1

In the first round, we focus on several questions:

What could this project be?

What problem is it solving?

What space is it exploring?

Draw from theme inspirations

Think “Blue Sky”

These questions help us to understand the domains and what others are trying to solve.

For example, at this table, we defined the ideas into everyday sustainability. We could combine functions and technologies, refresh everyday items into sustainability promotion. The existing ideas are trying to solve several issues including climate change, waste management, food waste and so on. Those ideas are exploring agriculture, marine biology, pollution and so on.

Round 2

In the second round, we focus on the following issues:

Who are we designing for?

Where could the project be applied?

Which situation(s)?

What experience are we designing?

Think about the theme

Why should we do it?

What values are we designing for?

These questions help us to understand the design purposes and design attempts.

Round 3

The last round we were targeting on the following issues:

How could the concept be realized?

What approach(es) could we take?

These questions discuss potential solutions, we add some new inspirations to the existing ideas or even came up with completely new ideas, which provides more angles to the domain.

Works to be done

During this weekend, our group will shot a video to describe our idea and prepare for next week's presentation. Again, this idea is still in generating process, we are happy to gather any feedback from the teaching team and others.

Bash

In the Wednesday session, we had a call in from a former UQ student based in London. I was surprised that his #1 tip was to be friends with the recruiter, not to work on your CV or portfolio, although it makes sense. I have previously landed a job from a recruiter and I can see how that is a good tool. The exercise he was running was very interesting, I ended up with the word invested. I feel like this represents me in a good way because I never half do something, I am always curious and well, invested. I will now try to use that word further in my job searching process.

Team formation

In the Wednesday session also got our teams, which was no huge surprise for me. I have worked with all team members before, which can be for both the good and the worse. Good because I know these team members are motivated, well communicated and ambitious, for the worse simply because it will be the same input as before, no new perspectives. But I think we will be able to ideate well and still be able to come up with creative ideas.

Team ideation

We met after class and ideated, with Marie joining us through Discord. We spent the time getting to know the topic, emotional intelligence. I shared what the discussion was about when I was at the table and we used the butchers paper and posters to generate more ideas. The way we did it was to come up with both input (externally), input (internally) and output and tried to mix and match. We planned for a meeting on Friday and agreed that we all had to bring 2 ideas to the table to that meeting.

Individual ideating

For the individual ideation (to come up with 2 ideas as a base for the Friday meeting), I found myself doing the same things as we did in the meeting, coming up with the same or similar ideas. I therefore asked my roomie, presented the task and mentioned the different ideas I had. He happened to know about a brain activity tracking headset and helped me find it! It would be very very interesting to actually track actual brain activity to somehow find out about emotions or how someone is feeling, and use this data to display some output. We saw that the headset itself was 100$, which is completely doable. What might be the challenge was the software to control the helmet, which might be a lot more expensive. Below is some of my ideation process:

We ended up ideating on how it is actually possible to train a headset to trigger a certain activity and how this could be used to for example be picked up by another headset. An idea we had earlier was to somehow display how others feel about you (Throw emoji balls at someone), and we tried imagining how this could be done with brain activity headsets instead. We also explored how we could use some sort of tracking software, that tracks the tone/emotions of the things you are typing (like Grammarly), and for example track twitter, and display somewhere how the world is feeling at the moment.

I had a lot of fun ideating this topic, as a lot can be done. It is, however, easier to come up with "blue sky" ideas rather than realistic ideas. These were the ideas I ended up suggesting for the group:

Idea decision

On the Friday meeting, we each presented our ideas for each other. I think we handled it well in terms of giving each idea enough attention and had a small ideation for each idea. The process was all in all a group discussion where we built on each other ideas and that way came up with new ones. I tried asking questions that I knew we couldn't always answer, like "Where would that be?" or "How can we make this fit into the everyday life", or even playing with ideas like "What if we changed this to a different output". This worked to refine ideas and play around with concepts. We ended up setting up a lot of different outputs, inputs and variants of the final idea. In the future, I would love to see how we can make this idea more purposeful, but for now, it is a sufficient idea.

World Cafe

I have participated in many group discussion on that day, the most memorable topics were emotional intelligence and body as controller.

Emotional intelligence

Our group has came up with a new design named traffic manner. When you are driving a vehicle, some people may give way to you and you want to say "thank you!". But it would be dangerous to do that on road. Traffic manner provides a solution to deal with this problem. By simply pressing one button, a smiley face with the word "Thanks" will pop up on the top of the car:)

Body as controller

This is the topic that I like the most, the idea running hand inspire me to turn my hand into controllers that control different mini games. It will be further discussed in my next documentation.

Inspiration

Basically, this is an interactive game that design for users to use their hands as controllers to defeat enemies by flying an aircraft. There are different flying modes that changed by users' gesture. There are two controllers (Left hand and Right hand).

For the left hand, different gestures represent different ways of attack. For example, pointing out the thumb and index finger generates a normal attack; pointing out the thumb, index and middle finger generates a power attack.

For the right hand, different gestures represent different ways of attack. For example, pointing out the thumb and little finger generate a slow speed but very accurate flying mode; pointing out all fingers generate a fast very inaccurate flying mode.

This game is inspired by a poster called running hand, by using hand as a controller, the gamer can control the character to pass different levels. It made me think of a mini game I played in my childhood, which was using hand to simulate aircraft to fight the bad guys. This is a very good opportunity for me to make this childhood dream comes true. Also, I search for a lot of similar games to come up with this project.

Target User

This idea is designed for the public, anyone who are interested in gaming can try this game. There is a special case that I want to mention here. Mysophobia refers to a pathological fear of contamination and germs. They have strong fear toward germs and virus, using a gesture controller can prevent them from touching the physical controller while gaming with other people. This project provides them a brand new option for gaming.

World Café

This week is my first week back to campus, and I hope everything goes well for this semester.

There was a “World Café” in this week's class. Students' ideas were divided into 17 categories: 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 a controller, Ability-centric interactions.

In a randomly allocated group discussion, we had a deeper discussion of different ideas from the same classification.

In this activity, I found a lot of interesting ideas. However, these ideas may not be perfect in the current stage and need further optimization. An idea that impressed me throughout the discussion came from “beautify the self”. To put it simply, the meaning of this idea is to use a wearable device to detect a person's mood and health status and visualize the user's health status in the form of a tree to help users pay attention to their physical health status. When the user's physical condition is in good condition, the growth state of the tree shows a good trend, otherwise, the health trend of the tree will show a downward trend.

First of all, I think this idea is very good. Visualizing things that are difficult for people to perceive will better attract people's attention. However, the downside of this idea is that it may have a negative psychological impact on some users. For example, some users who are not in good physical condition or who have psychological problems, if their tree growth status has been showing a downward trend, will this bring them bad psychological cues and cause a vicious circle?

The discussion of this idea led me to discover that every idea may not be perfect, because everyone's thinking has certain limitations. Therefore, discussion and research with different people can better avoid this situation. And can make their own design can be adapted to more users.

In the final group selection, I chose music-related topics, because I think that music can be engaging and give users a better interactive experience. At the same time, I have more information on this topic.

Workshop Induction

I think this course is very necessary. In the group creation later this semester, we are likely to involve making our own installations. This course mainly introduces the use of different machines and facilities.

Tuesday

From the beginning of the semester, I saw world cafe in the schedule and was immediately intrigued. As a result, i was looking forward to today.

I found out that it worked by sitting at tables of about 6 around a theme, then discussing and iterating various concepts.

My first table was for musical things. What we focosed on was the punching bag musical fountain, where users could punch it to destress and have the fountain and music adapt to the punches. This reminded me of performances such as Master of Tides by Lindsey Stirling and Kairos by Derek Hough, which led me to think that it could be further developed as an unique element to similar flash mobs, where beat heavy music could have punching incorporated into the choreography and have the water be synchronized to the performance. Another table that stood out to me was Bothersome Tech. The cover roller morning alarm seemed like a great way for users who have trouble getting out of bed. i thought more interactions could be incorporated, such as snooze functions, or having the bed vibrate. I thought this could be incorporated with my own concept, the smart curtian, where the curtains turn fully trasparent or open when the alarm rings to let light in, or having the user get out of bed to open the curtain to shut the alarm off. Going back to musical things, we moved on to prod paper, where lines and shapes drawn on paper with different thicknesses are transformed to sound. I thought this could be developed further, with different coloured pencils being played with different instruments. It could be also used on normal score sheets in a more professional sense, where it would be played in order with the different colours, allowing composers to hear and plan out how each note sounds played together with different instruments The percussion glove, which makes various sounds based on hand shape, could be further developed for use with a guitar or piana, where the various shapes made could play accomaniying drumbears, or the user could use the hand shapes while playing the guitar for drumbeats, which could be useful for buskers or one man bands.

We also came up with a concept - The Sounding Board. this involves a board which can be connected to others, and blocks can be placed in the grid positions on the board, different colours being different instruments, where stacking blocks higher would result in a higher pitch, and more consecutive blocks would be the note playing for a longer time. this would be useful in kids to develop fine motor skills as well as understanding how things work. this could also primarily used in music classes to understand different notes as well as counts in music.

Wednesday

The talk with Bash was extremely informative and inspiring. I was not expecting the exercise and ended up with the word designer. It describes me as I try to find art and beauty in everything, and try to find creative ways to complete a task. I also learnt useful tips on how to plan for employment, such as finding a place where you fit.

We also received our team allocations. I was surprised to have not gotten any of my preferences despite dates matching up, and am quite worried as i struggle with a language barrier with all my teammates. We also have very similar skills and talents, while having different personalities, which will be interesting to overcome in the long run

Below are the potential base ideas we narrowed down our options to, before developing them further to allow for more interactions

For the first part of the contact, we got to hear from a UX designer living in London named Bash. He was insightful about what companies might want and being true to yourself. I haven’t stopped to think about what kind of company I would like to work at or what type of environment I would prefer as I have been too focused on wanting to apply for as many jobs as possible. This made me realise that it would be beneficial to me if I researched more into the companies I am applying for. It was also good of Bash not to sugar-coat the fact that finding a job will not be easy, as many people are applying for the same positions; this puts things into perspective and allows us to be prepared to not always get the position. Bash also talked about how to improve your chances by having good relationships with recruiters and focusing on what makes you unique. Bash got us to do an exercise to find out what makes us unique. This exercise was very difficult for me as I found it hard to think of something that makes me unique and would help with getting a job. However, I was able to come up with three words: UX, positive and Laugh. The word I chose was laugh because I enjoy laughing with other people, such as family, friends and co-workers. Sometimes it is nice just to laugh, though this doesn’t mean that work shouldn’t be taken seriously. Instead, it is about creating a positive environment where you can enjoy each other’s company.

Team Formation

Last part of the contact session was where we finally found out our teams and the theme we are meant to be focusing on. I was surprised about getting musical things as it was not one of my preferences; however, it would be interesting to see what ideas our team comes up with. I was a little concerned as I am not musically gifted; however, I have realised that this could be useful especially if we go down the path of allowing people who don’t know how to play an instrument, to be able to create music. This would be exciting to explore as I would love a product that enabled me to play certain music pieces. As a team, we discussed potential ideas and constraints for the concept. These included having ideas that either manipulated the natural sound the object made, having different objects represent different instruments or having different sounds/notes depending on how the user interacts with the object. One constraint that we came up with is to use only one everyday object. The target audience is aimed at people who are not musical but want to be able to play music.

Team Progress

Currently, we as a team are focusing on completing the team agreement and coming up with a concept for the pitch. The plan was to have everyone come up with a potential idea, ways to interact and how to create music or sound. The idea that I have come up with is explained below.

Possible Everyday Objects: Bin, Kitchen utensils.

Interactions: Types of interactions are manipulating the natural sound of the objects or creating music notes through different interactions with the object.

Bin Interaction: Bins are something that is all around us every day. Different materials used for bins make differing sounds. Ways the person could interact with the bin is by hitting it to make a sound recording. Then the user could manipulate the bin by stroking to change the pitch and the speed of the tapping could change the tempo. Problem with this is the hygiene as many people will not be comfortable interacting with the bin; therefore, it will probably be an office bin that is in the study or bedroom. Another issue is that there will be limitations on the different sounds they could create, and it would not be stimulating enough to use every day.

Kitchen Utensils: Most people use some sort of kitchen utensil every day. For me, it is mostly a metal fork. Two forks could be used to tap each other and use the top parts to scrap one another. Another way to interact with the objects is to use one fork to hit various parts of the other fork as it creates different sounds. These different sounds could produce different music notes and when the differing interactions are done consecutively and in a certain amount of time, it will be able to create music. One fork could also be used instead. The fork would have to be clean to interact with it as this could be problematic, especially if kids are interacting with this object.

Another way would be to have a fork, knife and spoon each represent a different instrument.

This week was crucial for team formation. A World Café session was conducted on Tuesday, which consisted of multiple rounds of context, outlining audience and domain, then refining the ideas. This process was rather tedious but it prompted a lot of design thinking, which I enjoyed.

Tables were set up for each of the different themes the tutors had collated:

• 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

It was interesting to see the progress from last week's themes - basic and broad to rather specific.

Round 1: Context

This first round required us to look at the theme and ideate what project could be created, and look at what space and problem it might be exploring or solving. Early into World Café I realised I'd be doing a lot of speaking since there wasn't a lot of individual contribution most of the time. Anyhow, those who participated provided diverse insights and there were even some really excellent ideas. World Café wasn't only beneficial for concept development, but for getting to know my classmates, who each bring a different outlook on life and tech into the shared space of our table. Having multiple mini-rounds was a bit hectic, but the entire time I was constantly immersed in the process.

Round 2: Audience/Domain

This round looked at who we were designing for, and where the project could be applied. This part was a bit difficult since as I moved to new tables I realised they hadn't actually developed a new concept and the host would basically explain their critiques of each project, rather than trying to create a new one or clarify a theme. Anyhow, for the ones where I had something to work with, we explored some interesting ideas. One that really stuck with me was one of the music ones (ironic how it stuck with me but I'm not 100% certain what the theme actually was). We looked not only at those who were born without a sense, but also those who lose it either as they age, or due to an incident or developed condition. I enjoyed exploring audiences that don't have products catered towards them.

This also made me interested in the ability-centric interactions but I hadn't considered it when choosing what table to go to, so I never got to see what ideas had been created.

Round 3: Refine

This process was again a bit difficult, since some themes really had nothing to go off. There were a lot of notes but a lot of them seemed to just elaborate on the existing concepts. I think at this point, anyone who was a host struggled to recall everything that had been written down, since I think there was a habit of hosts simply recalling what the group had done during their session, and not really of what past developments had been made.

While I really like the theme of sustainability, and it's something I like applying to my everyday life. The fact that there were pretty much no properly outlined concepts made it difficult to /refine/ as the round requires us to do, so for some of the last groups I ended up coming up with other ideas.

Overall, the experience was rather interesting. It was definitely informative but I only managed to go to about half of the tables. This meant that when it came to picking my favourite themes, I wouldn't actually know about whether the themes were actually good and proposed a great challenge for the course. I blame myself partially for this, as I went to random themes rather than thinking of which ones I was fond of, and wanted to elaborate on. Furthermore, the fact that there was only a little bit of work for some of the themes was incredibly disappointing. There were themes like emotional totems and sustainability that my heart desired, but when it came down to it, there were not many good ideas, and almost no development, so while I did vote for them, I was still unsure.

Teams

So the second class this week, we started off with a call with Bash Isai, a graduate who moved to the UK. He provided some very insightful advice to us about getting out there in the real world, and to be rather honest, I am freaking out constantly about the concept of having to and needing to find a job.

Anyway, he ran an activity where we had to write a 13 word paragraph, extend it to 50 words, then cut it down in half until we were left with 3 words - then 1. I realised I hadn't done the activity correctly and probably had too much fun with it, but I guess that is a good aspect too.

My paragraph ended up being:

Hi, my name is Rika.

I am a digital consultant/UX designer.

I am unique because I like drawing birds. I did synchronised swimming between the ages of 6 and 12 and was thrown 2 metres into the air by my team mates, which I believe was my earliest and most memorable experience of trust and team work. I am also two halves Asian but can only speak English.

Cutting words down, my 3 most defining words were:

1. UX
2. Birds
3. Asian

My single word ended up being birds.

I felt a bit stupid after learning others had words like "outstanding", "victorious", or "challenge". But, when I think about it, I guess it shows my dedication to the things I'm passionate about? I'm mostly bullsh*tting it, but I guess I'm also mostly unashamed about the things I really enjoy as an individual. In the past I've had interviews at rather corporate places like Deloitte and the American Chamber of Commerce, and while I'm dressed in a proper suit with my hair all tidy and presentable, while remaining professional, I think it's important to have a bit of character and stand out. Whether talking about drawing birds is a desirable characteristic is entirely dependent on who I might speak to, but at least my mention of synchronised swimming is something a bit more relevant.

While synchronised swimming occupied most of my childhood and my mindset was always about preparing for the next competition, it was honestly one of the most valuable experiences I've had to date. 6 years of working with various teams - kids my age, women a whole decade older than me, in a team of 4 or 10. Like I mentioned, I was thrown into the air a metre or two by the older swimmers. Not just once. It was part of a routine and we had to get it right so it would happen about 10 times a day for a few weeks. My sister and I were the most experienced in our age group so we took part in our "combination team", and as the youngest I was rightfully the Chosen One. Anyway, enough about that - synchronised swimming has certainly been one of the most intense sports I've played, with the amount of coordination which is reliant on both individual efforts (practising and memorising routines in our own time), and a team effort to move ourselves around a pool to ensure we're all actually synchronised. That's the entire point of the sport.

Anyway, so put simply, while I did come up with some bizarre sentences, I do feel they still have some relevance, and it doesn't hurt to make an impression with potential employers.

Teams (Cont.)

Back to the teams. I was lucky enough to be in a team with two of my friends, and two unfamiliar students. I didn't get any of my theme choices, but I am still happy about the theme we got - musical things. This week, we'd established a team agreement, and got familiar with each other. One of the students were late, so I feel she might've been a bit behind, but I think we all got on pretty well. We established communication as one of our biggest things, since while things may go well or badly, lack of communication really just escalates them, and it is not a good time.

We quickly tried to develop on the concepts that were outlined from World Café.

I'm feeling a bit rushed about assessment, but I am looking forward to what our team comes up with.

In the Tuesday session, the majority of the time was spent participating in World Café. Three sessions were conducted.

In the first session, the theme that I was a part of was Music Metrics. The team focussed on understanding the theme and finding communities with the different projects, such as the project being in a public space where multiple users can use it at once, how music was being displayed and what data was being inputted or used. No solid ideas were created due to it being the first part of the round. In the next part, I was the host. For the first few minutes, I summarised what took place in our discussions, then encouraged the other people in the team to discuss their thoughts about the idea, questions or what they had discussed in the idea.

The second round, themes that were explored were Emotion Totem, Emotional Intelligence and Change through discomfort. In this round, the focus was on the audience and the situation that the concept will be used in. For emotion totem, one of the ideas I came up with, based on other people’s ideas, was to create a product for parents, allowing them to know what emotions their child is feeling when they are at school. The purpose of this was to keep parents informed about their child’s wellbeing and if they are having negative experiences at school, or if they are enjoying or having a normal day. Other ideas were to have a product that helps show emotions to people who aren’t good at reading body language. Another idea that the team came up with was to have something similar to an emotion diary where a person keeps track of their emotions throughout the day, week, month, year or longer and they can know what occurred when they were feeling a particular emotion.

The themes that were looked at in the third round was Sassy Tech and Altered Landscapes. The third round was where we were expected to refine the ideas of others. This was particularly difficult for Sassy Tech as we had no host, and from what we could see, no ideas were given other than the posters. As a team, we discussed how each poster fit within the theme, such as having a personality because it shows emotion and being sassy because of the way it cheekily communicated to the user. One idea that some of the team members came up with was to expand on the poster with the hand lock door, where a user has to unlock the door by shaking the hand. They refined this by having the users remember different secret handshakes to enter. One constraint that was discussed with this idea was the location. For example, it couldn’t be a door that had a lot of traffic or a place where people needed to enter quickly, like a hospital. Other refinements were to have the door say cheeky comments. This theme was one of the ones I did not want to do as I wasn’t inspired and able to come with ideas as I did with other themes.

The last was Altered Landscapes, I was on this table twice, and was the host for the last part of the round. One idea that I came up with, that was inspired by the poster, allowed users to perceive the room the way toys would have if they were alive, like in toy story. This was an interesting concept and a way that I refined it was to have a small model of the room and have a doll or toy be the controller where you manipulate to walk around the room through the VR. This theme, however, wasn’t something I was particularly interested in exploring as I couldn’t think of other novel ways to create a product that wouldn’t use VR or AR, as these were not something I wanted to use because I would be worried that it wouldn’t provide enough physical interaction every day.

The last part of the contact was to choose three themes that you wanted to work on. The three that I chose was emotion totem, emotional intelligence and change through positive reinforcement. They are the ones I thought I could help come up with an interesting and exciting product.

Something doesn't come from nothing. Millions of people have screamed into the void, blaring ideas and thought into every design space one can think of, and even several design spaces most people wouldn't.

That's right - once again, it was time to look into research, to see what already exists in the space. I think a flaw in doing this however, was just blindly jumping in to a number of different topics a little too early

This lead to a more frantic approach of .... come on. "surely there's something here that's relevant to what I want to do".

I knew it was time to stop when the realisation popped up again of - MAN, we have to create something unique, playful and interesting, and yet here I am sifting through these monoliths of basically garbage, that exists to qualify maybe the 20% of the paper thats actually something that we can get a lesson out of.

The actual thought was not this coherent, it was just "why I gotta look at so much paper to make something fun".

Likely, a sign of burnout, but also potentially just a need to use more narrow filters, or possibly different filters altogheter.

For now it's time for a break. I think there's a chance to be disillusioned by research. "this idea is too hard, we have nothing to go off... lets just change and do something else". This thought line leads to a bland, meaningless project, that no one wants to do, and that the teaching team knows is a sham too. But yet - we persist through it because of the idea that we've made our bed, and have to lie in it now.

But I like the ideas I have at the moment. they're not ready for the sacrifiial pyre just yet... so tomorrow I'll look at the same issue again, with a different telescope, hopefully.

On Tuesday we completed the world cafe activity. World Cafe involved multiple tables, each with a different theme that a group of us sat at and discussed. The themes on the tables were the themes derived from previous themeing activities that we did in week two. There were multiple rounds involved in world cafe which each went for 15 minutes. At each round people would move to a new table with a new theme and different peers. At each table there was a host who remained from the previous round to inform the new group of the discussion and ideation that occurred in the previous round. The aim of each round was to think into the theme and ideas from the project inspiration and further develop potential concepts under the theme.

The themes I worked on included:

- Musical things

- Creative learning

- Altered landscapes

- Body as controller

- Change through discomfort

The themes I enjoyed working on most were creative thinking and altered landscapes as I found it easiest to come up with creative ideas and potential modes of interaction. For creative learning, my group came up with ideas involving interactive maps, playdough as an interaction mode and using body movements to learn Asian languages. For altered landscapes, I liked the idea of a greenhouse dome to be placed in busy CBD areas with high stress environments where workers could come to spend their breaks and somehow interact with the peaceful environment.

Although I wasn’t able to work on mundane spaces, this is the theme I most want to work on as I am interested in creating a large project using lights and sound - which would enhance any mundane space. Due to this I put my first choice on Mundane spaces. I put creative learning as my second and musical things as my third as I would be keen to work with sound.

In Wednesday's class we listened to a presentation by Bash Isai, a UQ alumni currently working in product development in the UK. Bash talked about various experiences he has had throughout uni and in the workforce he provided valuable tips regarding how to gain employment once you finish your degree. Bash also made us complete an activity that required us to write 50 words about ourselves and what makes us unique. We then went through in rounds and crossed out words that did not describe us eventually being left with only one word. My word for this activity was creativity. I believe my word is an accurate representation of me. Bash asked us to explain why we believe our word represented us, and I believe that this is because I think of everything in life in a creative manner. I enjoy using my creativity and applying it to situations in my social, work and university life to improve everything I am doing. I think this characteristic will also be directly applicable to the processes I will conduct in this course.

Reflection:

This was a really interesting and engaging week in terms of the activities and studios we partcipated in. I really enjoyed the World Cafe as I have been struggling to ideate concepts that align with the studio domain. World Cafe allowed me to just brainstorm my thoughts for each theme without judgement which I feel helped me a lot in ideating new concepts and interaction modes. I actually surprised myself with how many ideas I came up with and even found myself thinking of concepts throughout the week.

I mentioned that I was eager to work on 'Mundane Spaces' as I want to create a really exciting and engaging concept. This is mainly due to my inspiration from a Team Lab exhibit I was able to view while in Tokyo recently. I was intrigued and amazed at their use of light and colour to create beautiful environments in simple, plain, black rooms: https://www.teamlab.art/

Team X

Finally, I formed a team with three classmates who had never worked together before. This is a huge challenge for me, but I am confident that we can make a very successful and attractive musical metric device.

After the first meeting, we decided our team name was Team X. The name has two meanings. The first is that X is the Roman numeral 10, and we are team 10. In addition, we think X is a cool letter, it represents infinite possibilities. I hope that our team also has unlimited creativity.

Project

We chose one of our team member's idea as a basic idea and designed more complex and engaging ways to interact. After our discussion, we decided to make an interactive sports table. Install the vibration sensor and projector inside the table. Generate different vibration frequencies according to different movement modes, and generate music and images according to the vibration frequency.We hope that through these feedbacks, people will be able to feel information they have not experienced before, and will bring them more diverse forms of exercise.

To further prepare for the 10 minute presentation, my team will meet on Monday from 12pm - 2pm to solidify our proposed concept.

I interviewed five people and asked these questions:

1. What does enhance mean to you?
2. What does mundane mean to you/ How do you interpret mundane?
3. What comes to mind when you think of 'mundane space'?

(s44303948)

1. enhance to me brings to my mind the idea of increasing a certain facet of something, possibly in quality or size
2. mundane is when something is unoriginal, boring and generally fails to grab my attention
3. a mundane space makes me think of a place that is otherwise unexciting, maybe a public bench in an uninviting park or a classroom void of any personal belongings

Team Zoomista is presenting in the first session on Tuesday (17 March 2020)

Currently, there is speculation about the future of Physical Computing due to growing concerns about COVID-19. Personally, I am worried about the capabilities of this course transitioning to be exclusively online. Regardless, I am looking forward to working with my team!

Work Done & How it Relates

World Cafe

Round 1: Exploring the theme/domain

Round 2: Audience/Context

Round 3: Refining a concept

I should have taken more photos but from the top of my head, I was at Enhancing Mundane Spaces(also host), Musical Things, Creative Learning(also host), and Body as Controller. I think the tables that most excited me were Creative Learning and Enhancing Mundane Spaces because we came up with some really cool concepts.

One of the concepts was finding a way to make grocery shopping less boring and Mario-Kartifying the trolleys was proposed. Another concept was a 360 degree see-saw plaything which was adapting the Chroma concept to help children learn how to work as a team and achieve a specific colour. We played with the scale of it and exhausted the idea so moved onto refining another concept. We then looked at how Mort could be improved to not just teach morse code. I thought Mort might be a great personified grammar helper that would teach children proper grammar and sentence structure by instructing them to produce a sentence with a Subject, Verb, Object, or sayign a sentence and telling the user to pull a specific leg when the word is a Noun, Verb, etc.

In Musical Things, there was a lot of talk about showing music as more than just sound so having it as a vibration, visual effects, and having music as a community experience for all to enjoy and not just professionals. The main experience that influence my thoughts in this space was when I got out of high school (I was a band geek) and realised I couldn't join a band unless I was studying music professionally or doing the music courses at UQ as an elective (in addition to auditioning).

There were some really awesome discussions during the World Cafe and I liked that we could visualise the idea on the paper even if we couldn't find the words for what we had in mind. I noticed there were some rounds that were a bit quiet at the start but once we had a spark flowing it was very lively. The conversation dying down was a pretty good indicator that we could probably talk about a different concept or prompt-question.

At the end of the World Cafe, we put our preferences in and waited for the results of teams to be announced the next day. I put my preferences down as

1. Creative Learning
2. Enhancing Mundane Spaces
3. Musical Things

I know at the start of the semester I was keen to move away from the "educational" theme of my previous projects but I think I have to accept that I'll always be passionate about helping others realise that learning is enjoyable. There were also a few people in each theme that I was keen to work with and I didn't put my preferences down immediately because I wanted to kindof scope out who else was interested in the same themes as me.

Bash Isai - Guest Speaker

On Wednesday morning, Bash Isai zoomed in from London where it was 11pm there. He told us some really useful career/life advice about selling yourself as a very hire-able employee and being the one that can lessen the stress of the person hiring.

We completed an activity which involved describing ourselves in 50 words, then crossing them out gradually until it got down to one word. My word was analyse. I think it represents me best because I like to gather information before making decisions regardless of whether it's work-related or in daily life. I am the type of person that will watch 27484473 review videos of the thing I'm considering buying, and I tend to straight up ask my friends what they want for their birthday instead of taking the risk that they won't like what they get.

This activity was pretty useful because I did another video interview the day after and I was able to pivot my answers better as an employable candidate. Still scary and terrifying to do those recorded video interviews but I guess it only gets better with practice and over a long long period of time.

Team (Four)mation

Team allocations were released after the morning break and I ended up being in Team 4 with Nelson, Summer and Rhea with the theme of Creative Learning. We spent until lunch getting to know each other and writing up our team agreement. Our skills are spread out and I'm looking forward to working together to create something really cool. I said I was good at documentation and we all agreed that communication is really fundamental. It was helpful to talk about our past group experiences and the issues we faced in them, as well as discuss our work tendencies and productive periods in the day. We all like when goals are met and like to have the motivation and pressure of milestones and deadlines with the flexibility to change depending on circumstances and factors (which is where communication plays a vital role).

Lorna went through the methods and what we needed to do for next week, then we went off to lunch.

After the lunch break we finalised the terms of our team agreement and thought about possible concepts we could explore in the space of Creative Learning. I told them about my two ideas of Mort as a grammar/sentence structure buddy and Chroma as a 3D interactive seesaw thing. Summer had a really interesting take on the pressure feature of Chroma where students could have a pressure sensitive button that they could press to help the teacher understand how confused they are about the content in the classroom. If the student presses harder, they are more confused. It would reflect the cognitive pressure on the student without "outing" them to the class, thereby helping shy students who might not be brave enough to raise their hand and ask for help.

We also signed up to present 2nd on Tuesday. Our team name is still yet to be determined but we joked about keeping it as Team 4 or calling ourselves 3+1 (because it equals 4, and also because that's how many girls and guys we have).

Since there wasn't enough time to discuss all the concepts we wanted to, we set aside some work to think of some concepts and discuss them on Monday. I thought of an Art Abstraction concept where 3D shapes are magnetised and can produce "real life" images when the user combines the shapes and sees them through an AR lens. Initially this meeting on Monday was going to be on campus but Rhea suggested doing it remotely due to the CoVid-19 situation so we've got a Zoom link set up and our Google Document for the Idea Discussion.

Gluing my box together

I decided to grab Weldbond Universal Adhesive from Bunnings instead of braving the grounds of UQ Innovate to glue my box together. The main factors that contributed to this decision were my wariness for going to campus more than necessary and the non-toxic aspect of the glue. I did do some research into the best glues for acrylic, which mainly said acrylics require solvents to chemically bond the acrylic pieces together. For the purpose of this box, which is now nicely adorning the TV unit, I figured that the universal adhesive would be fine.

Work To Do

• Team Meeting (Monday 12PM through Zoom) to discuss concepts and finalise one for the concept proposal in class on Tuesday Session 1 (9:30)
• Team name! and charter (which is 98% complete, just needs signatures)
• Sketch/props to be gathered and brought
• Proposal & critiques of other team concepts

Work That Inspired Me

I first came across this designer through a documentary series on Netflix. Her work inspires me because she puts a lot of effort into making sure kids keep their creativity flowing and imagination growing. I like the way she thinks and how she doesn't just target a specific gender or way of thinking when she designs the toys.

For more suitable grouping, we did world cafe. According to change the themes of each table and talking to others, I found some interesting projects and got more ideas.

a. Beautify the Self

In this theme, all the projects are using technology to comfort the users, helping them relaxed. We thought the Breathing light, the Smart tree and the Smart bed are interesting. But each of them was too simple to make. As a result, we believed that we could using VR to combine these idea together and design a smart bedroom. However, this was really difficult for us to make. So, I gave up this theme at last.

b. Body as controller

My second table was Body as controller. I was really intersted in this theme. Because my own project is also classified in this theme. We talked about the places we could set these installations and whom we designed for. Homes, museums, hospitals and gyms were the suitable places to make these devices. All the people who love sports, animals and playing games will fond into these devices.

c. Musical things

This theme is combining normal stuff and music together to make normal stuff more interesting. I did such device before in design thinking course. So, I thought Musical metrics was more attractive to me.

Finally, I chose Body as controller and Musical metrics as my favorite themes.