inspiration

My design is a memory wardrobe. My inspiration comes from Doraemon's memory bread. Eat this bread and you will get corresponding memories. Over time, we will forget many good memories. For example, trips and meetings. My design is to let the wardrobe record the memories of each trip (through the clothes worn at the time)

Description

main function

The main function is to record a memory for each piece of clothes that user puts in. Wardrobe will challenge the user to wear clothes that have not been worn for a long time. During challenge, the wardrobe will tell him about this memory.

sharing memory

In addition, if the user allows it, wardrobe will link other memories wardrobes and exchange interesting memories with each other. Users can view these memories and share them.

sketch

post

Ideas:

In conteact session, our teammates came up with some interesting ideas, and then we discussed these ideas.

Our theme is enhancement mundane space. According to this theme, we identified some boring things, like typing,meeting,waiting for printers in offices, homework, housework in houses, exercise, studying, waiting for buses, waiting for traffic lights in university.

Some of them I thought were very attractive.

No.1

This concept can be designed for cleaning the floor. Each trash will be represented as a virtual coin, when the broom wipe the trash, the coin will be eaten and the user will get one point as a reward. Family members can join the actovity of cleaning the floor. However, we are considerring that how to make the whole house interactive by this kind of game.

No.2

This concept is aimed at making the mailbox interesting through chaning the traditional shape of mailbox to some cute animals images, such as cats, dogs. When people put a letter or something eles in the mailbox, the owner of the mailbox will be reminded by some sounds from the mailbox when the owner passing away the mailbox. However, the constrain of this concept is that people seldom use the mailbox to send letters nowsdays.

No.3

Musical stairs is designed for people who think climbing stairs is boring and tired. The stair railing is designed as the stave. People can make sounds or music by the stave on the stair railing.

No.4

Reminder bag is for reminding users by the digital screen on the back of bag. But we think this idea lacks some interactions.

No.5

Beacuse of the COVID-19, we often spend more than 20 seconds washing hance one time, which is so boring. Therefore, we expected to use projection to make water has some special effects. For example, the water come out from the tap with star and galaxy. When finishing washing the hand, there are some planets around user's hands. Even though I really like this idea because it makes washing hands fantastic and I like outerspace, we have not figured out how to implement.

No.6

The chope game makes cooking attractive and entertaining. When users are choping the vegatables or meat, there a monster will display. If the monster is defeated, which means the food has been choped successfully.

We will discuss more about these ideas and consider more interactions about them this week.

When you practice an instrument alone or want an improvised solo at a friend's party, the performance is often dull because of the lack of drums. Or, when you practice, you often mess around to follow the drums of the accompaniment. Now With the help of a drummer, you can easily complete a rhythmic performance anywhere.

A drummer is a small box that combines a high-speed camera, a microcomputer, and a subwoofer. It will see the hands you are playing the instrument and infer the melody you are playing.[1] Therefore, any instrument played with both hands can be accepted by the drummer, such as guitar, saxophone, accordion or even piano. When it analyzes the music you are playing and compares it with similar melody in the library, it will play the responsive drums bit to keep up with your performance according to the speed of your current performance.[2]

If we want to switch the drum point in the performance, we can make the drum sound more compact by speeding up the performance. Or, we can solve it with a touch pad connected to the drummer. For myself, I really like playing guitar while beating with my feet , which inspired me to design a touch pad. The touch pad is a soft pad laying on the ground, divided into two parts A (front) and B (back). When we give it a special instruction (Two consecutive rapid hits). The drummer will respond accordingly to change the rhythm pattern of the drum. For example, double-hitting the A board will make the drummer more noisy, although the speed of the drum will not change ( The tempo is based on your playing speed), but the drummer will add more fancy and rhythmic patterns. Conversely, hitting the B board twice in succession will make the drum softer.[3,4]

For beginners of many instruments, it is not easy to maintain a certain speed for a long time. When the user stop due to mistakes, the drummer will not stop immediately but continue to play for a few seconds. Waiting for you to catch up.

Overall, this is the drummer, it is recommended for beginners of various instruments (except drums). He is suitable for use in small and closed environments such as rooms, garages.

World Cafe

Attend World Cafe this Tuesday, and I also participated in this activity during the stuodio1 last semester. There is no doubt that it gives us a deeper understanding of every theme and different ideas, and through three rounds (context, audience, refine) has given us new inspiration for these themes. Of course, the ultimate goal is to choose the theme that interests you and then invest your passion in them.

One of the ideas that impressed me was smoker baby, which belongs to the theme of change through discomfort. This is a device to persuade people to quit smoking. The creator ’s idea is that smokers will realize the dangers of smoking when they see the baby slowly die. Actually, I think the effect of this device on smokers will be very small, and it is not practical. It should not be promoted in daily life, but if it is displayed as an exhibit in a performance art exhibition, it may have a profound influence. Better results are achieved by using context transitions.

Team Formation

I met my team members on Wednesday. The theme we chose is music metrics. We all use music as the theme in project Inspiration. We discussed and brainstormed the project that we are going to make in the future. We tried to optimize and refine our current ideas. There are some collections of ideas for the time being, but we have not decided yet. I think the cooperation and interaction of the device are very important, which can add a lot of fun.

And the combination of fitness and music or the combination of painting and music is a good idea, which requires us to discuss in-depth in the group meeting.

Week 3

Re- Attempt of Project InspirationOn second attempt my idea has change to Shower singer controller:

So, what does shower singer controller do it replacing the new system that turn on the water and turn on the water output. When a user singing in the bathroom the water supply will start and output continually, when the user wants to turn off it, he must clap his hand 3 times. This could make the process more interesting . The system not only related to turn on and off, when user want to change the temperature, the system will change warmer or colder water depend on the type of the song. If the user singing a rap song, he could get change to much warmer, if it is a classic love song it might get colder. Type of song to change the temperature can be modifying anytime.

Inspiration and problem space.

The inspiration of the idea is when I go to the beach, when you want to use the show you have to keep pressing the button to continue the water output therefore lot of people keep press it until they leave. The water output a longtime even they leave this cause a lot of water wastage, Beside of that when I thinking this idea at I heard my housemate singing while he is taking a bath therefore I want to match up these 2 ideas together to make it more fun and solving the problem space.

World Cafe

In this week we have done a world café that we locate on each table and recreate or explore more ideas on certain problem space. There are few spaces I really like to explore is change through reward. On this topic discuss we could do on potential project. We have divided those into groups changing user metal health, physical health, sustainability, health lifestyle and education. We could force kids to eat greens and matching the idea they use their iPad during their dinner. Maybe if they have eaten their greens for 5 days, they can user their iPad. Secondly, we have discussed visualization of the person lifestyle such as you go to gym and you run enough time there can be an item to present. This problem space has lot of potential to explore and I quite enjoy generating ideas while this topic World café make me recreate or redesign more ideas and this give me a lot of reference to resubmit my project inspiration. I also think this is way better to just think on your won as everyone got different view or ideas, some good ideas normally come from group discussion.

Induction

On this week I have also done the uq innovate induction which introduce a lot to me especially the laser cutter which I have never use before. After the induction what I learned is always ask if you are not sure. :)

Group Work

As soon as the team split up we have start thinking what we can do we start to create a list of place we could more explore end up we quite like evaluator. On weekend we start explore more and prepare the prestation

We had a world café session this week before we form into a team. It was always exciting to have a discussion among different people in the class. I assumed most of us already know what world café is about; therefore, I will not explain it. During this session, I got to explore different themes where we use the posters' ideas and developed different contexts, users, scope, …etc. We had a total of 19 different themes, but I only got a chance to go 6 of them.

Ability-centric interaction

In this session, we started with identifying the theme and trying to understand what it is before we divided into two areas of what the ideas were and weren't. We went through all the posters and trying to get some ideas from it. It seems like most of them was focused on the vision-impaired or low vision people as a target audience(if I remembered it right). We tried to see if we can combine some of the ideas from the poster to generate new ideas out of it.

We came up with two ideas that they were somewhat similar in assisting vision-impaired people. The first one was having a bodysuit that could help the vision-impaired people to sense objects before they run it into it. The second one was having any surface covered with actuators; for example, it can be a table surface or a floor. It will help to carry an object to the user before they can reach it from far away. Time went out before we could elaborate and explore the ideas further. I felt it was quick before I could share more ideas on what we had. I noticed that when the table was silent and waiting for people who didn't speak to share. I would felt I need to say something to clear this silence; however, I ended up share something that I was not well-thought-out. People didn't understand what I was trying to say, so next time I should hold back and speak when my ideas were more plotted.

Guided Movement (Host)

I was a host in the third round of this section. Previous groups had broken down in section and given possible locations and some scenarios. For example, based on one of the posters (squat exercise, if I say the name right), they had an idea of having an exercise(game) in the public where people can interact and doing yoga together. Other ideas were navigation shoes and mechanical dogs, where people use the shoes as a GPS to guild them to the places they wanted to go. I elaborated a bit and trying to remove away from shoes and cellphones. I thought of a scene from a movie I saw that there was some sensor on the phone where they don't need to take the phone out. The road would appear direction to guild the user to the place they wanted to go. All the stores on the street will have a digital sign that appears in different colors to indicate a separate category of the stores. A light will blink to notify the user of the store that they are looking for. There were other good ideas our group has come up with, such as the shoe will guild the user to find healthy food after they finished working out in the gym. It saves trouble for the user to think and find healthy food to eat. The second one was instead of having a mechanical dog, the user could have a real pet(dog or cat) to do interactive exercise together in the pet park or at home. It helps both of them to do yoga and get healthy together. There are some more ideas that we also talked about, but I couldn't remember what it was.

Later in the second section, I explained what we had, and we narrow it down with what are the target users and giving more purpose to it. For example, a traveler(single or with a group) wants to have a consistent workout routine when they were traveling to a different country or area. However, later, I thought about if the user is living in a nice hotel, they usually have their gym for the customer to use. Nevertheless, it is just one side of the perspectives we look at in the limited time we had.

Technology with negative reinforcement

This theme was trying to get people to break up the bad habit by applying negative reinforcement. In the beginning, I didn't follow what other group member was talking about. The room was loud, and I couldn't hear what they were saying even though I was trying, but it was hard since they didn't speak up. I feel a bit left out, so I started to talk to a classmate who seated in front of me. We came up with our ideas by having an example right in front of us that people don't clean up after they finished eating. We have created ideas of how to punish people by having a bad dream after they go to bed, and all the trashes were chasing them. Or the smell will follow them if they don't clean up. We both had these crazy ideas. It was fun, but we don't know if it is possible to make it.

Altered Landscape

When I saw down the table, it was hard to understand what the previous group did. We didn't get clear information on what new ideas they had generated besides the ideas from the posters. We felt lost. I tried to bring some more ideas or asking what other ideas previous groups had. I was either being kind of rejected and pointed to the ideas, which was the same as the poster. It would be nice if people would want to twist and move away from existing ideas. Maybe everyone was tired after three rounds of discussions, and it was close to lunchtime. However, I was surprised that they used the post as an idea instead of just a reference. Even though it has lots of writings on the table, but it doesn't see going anywhere. People seem to stuck on sharing the picture and projected to the building, which was an original idea from one of the posters. Another one was people got minimized into a big world. In this around, I found it very hard to work with because it was behind, and we were supposed to think about the theme and be more specific rather than for self-amusement. A lacking purpose in why should we do it? What values are this design for? At that time, my mind couldn't think of any new ideas alone.

Digital sensation made physical

It was an interesting topic because senses are hard to cooperate with physical if we don't count touch, vision, and sound. Therefore, it is difficult to think and apply any technology into physical. At the table, we were discussing how to use technology to include smell and taste. We spent much time in this area and how to keep the smell lost longer. We didn't spend time thinking about what approaches we could take to make it physical. It was an interesting topic, which its also hard because I felt it was more internal feelings, not just what we know from the surface level. I will talk about it more in a different post.

Music Thing

It was the most enjoyable table I had on that day. People at the table were enthusiastic about creating fun music, and the ideas flow one after the other. It was a pleasant experience to be at the table with people who all enjoy and welling to participate. This time I learned to hold back and listen more before I speak. Based on the previously built concept, we created a sci-fi music player blocks with the string that has a base where each block has its tune. When the block stocks up, it produces high pitch and vice versa. If building the blocks in the x-axis, it creates long or short tones. We also thought about how to control the volume and make it more sci-fi. In the end, we came up with the concept of having the block building, representing skyscrapers, and the string is the base of the planet. When the music played, there would be laser striking the building as the alien invaded earth. The block would shoot up to the sky, and color would be painted behind its path to make a piece of art.

Enhanced Mundane Spaces

We started thinking about what we can do to make mundane space more fun. One idea we got was people have to dance in the elevator to get to the floor they want to go. We also had a few other ideas, but I couldn't remember the detail now. At the time, it was hard to come up with anything at the point of time. When I am thinking back now, it's funny that when we don't spend time thinking about mundane stuff. We could have millions of examples, but when we do spend time reviewing what's dull in our life. We couldn't think of any. Are we automatically eliminated what we thought is boring? And padding ourselves on the back by saying that life it all good.

What I got out from it...

It is my third experience of joining the activity. I found myself enjoyed more in this time around than past world cafés activity. I don't know if it is because I have more experience of how this activity works. Or I am keener to train my mind to think out of the box; I am not sure, but this is one of my goals in this class as I get so tired of trapping and stuck with my limited ideas. This activity helps me to learn from others and loosen up my mind without restriction. Yet, I still have a lot to learn. In some of the sections, I wish we could have more time because sometime I would need a bit of time to think before I shared my idea. But with the pressure of afraid others think that I didn't contribute. On the other hand, I would try to avoid to say ideas that were not fully established in my mind and caused people wouldn't understand what I was trying to say.

It was good to have an open-end topic to start a conversation, and having some supplementary references to get a head start on building new ideas was helpful. Nevertheless, it was hard to draw a line between either giving too much or too little information that might restrict our imagination. In some tables, that might be the case where people were confused or not sure what the task was. There were no new ideas produced, and people were relying on the references too much that cause them couldn't think of anything beyond what they have seemed.

I felt each turn around had a different experience, and it all depends on the people in that table. If people are more willing to participate and have some flight sky of ideas, it lights up the table, and the rest would follow. If people were less active, then it would be hard to carry on the conversation. But thinking from a different perspective, maybe the people who were less active because they were struggling to share with anything on the spot while others had more to say. Everyone has different ways of thought process, and it would be hard to tell by looking at the surface level.

Work Done

Tuesday

On Tuesday, we participated in world café. I hadn't done anything like this before and wasn't quite sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised by how focused and collaborative everyone was to explore the themes and extend the projects within each theme. I found the first round the easiest, doing "musical things" as it was a blank canvas and we could really write anything that came to mind. We explored what the theme actually means and came up with some really cool ideas. Some of these included:

• A virtual one man band where you can hit anywhere with your body (through almost dancing) to create music
• A 3D "room" that you move through to make music

I found each round after this one progressively more difficult as I couldn't read/understand what half of the pages were saying. The leader staying at each table did help to some degree but they still only really knew the details of the round before and if they could remember what the previous leader said. I also think my creativity was somewhat limited as I was reading others' ideas and having their ideas right in front of you, found it difficult to come up with new ones. I understand each round is meant to be built upon the previous team but I think the further through I got, the less I could contribute.

However, I think my second favourite round was when I worked on "bothersome tech". I enjoyed this because it was the final round so I could write whatever I wanted and our group came up with some really cool ideas.

After world café was completed, we then had to do the dreaded task of picking our preferences for themes. I found this very overwhelming as there was no clear themes I wanted to work on. I also struggled deciding whether to continue to try to work on my project or give it up to work on a more fun theme. I ended up choosing - "change through discomfort", "everyday sustainability", and "musical things".

Wednesday

Bash Presentation

On Wednesday we started off with the presentation from Bash. I thought this was one of the most helpful guest speakers I've ever heard from throughout my degree. I really liked the exercise where we had to write down 50 words about ourselves. I found this super challenging as I first just wrote down that I was unique because I have a double degree, which really says nothing about my qualities and isn't unique at all.

My paragraph ended up being:

"My name is Lucy

I am a UX designer and Market Analyst

I am unique because I also study business (majoring in marketing). I am a good collaborator and love working with others to get to the best outcome. I have a good understanding of others and their needs."

I don't think this is the best representation of who I am as a person so I do want to revisit this task at a later date. I think this is such a helpful exercise as I am currently job hunting and going to job interviews so its super important to understand what you value and also what makes you you.

My final word ended up being "collaborator" which I do think is representative of me. I know I work my best when I have a good team to bounce ideas off.

Teams

After this we were assigned our teams. I was very nervous for this process as I've been super excited about this course and didn't want to be put in a bad team, when realistically I think I would have had a great semester with anyone in the class. However, I did get put in a really good team and we were already working really well together. I was put in the team working on "change through discomfort".

Once we had met our team we completed the set discussion points and started discussing our team charter. We all seemed to agree and disagree on the main points so I think we'll work really well together.

After this discussion, we moved onto finding an idea for next week. I'm a little bit concerned about trying to find an idea that we are all happy with before next week. We all really want to make something fun but are quite limited in sticking to the theme. We started by looking at all the pieces of paper associated with our topic but we were quite overwhelmed trying to make sense of the notes from world café. We then moved on to listing all the "bad" habits we could think of, hoping an idea could be inspired from this. This is the final list we came up with.

We then put a tick beside all the habits that we think we could make an idea out of. The habit was deemed acceptable if we could think of an easy way to identify when this behaviour is taking place (e.g. hard to identify when someone is being forgetful) and if an extensive interaction could be used to stop this. For example, we didn't just want to have something where the behaviour occurs and then they are made uncomfortable (e.g. if they speed they get notified).

We started with the habit - snoozing your alarm

We then thought about sitting down for too long and came up with some really fun ideas.

We mainly came up with a chair that gets more and more uncomfortable the longer you sit in it. It starts with blowing cold air, then surround sound screaming, the chair gets lower and lower, the seat gets warm and water is released, it falls over.

Our front runners for this theme are:

1. Oscar (the bin that vomits if you put the wrong waste in) - we're not sure if we're allowed to do this as someone else came up with the idea
2. Artificial Conscience 2.0 (my idea where the plant responds to the environment its placed in but with added features to make it more related to negative reinforcement and discomfort) - aren't yet sure how to relate it to the topic more
3. Uncomfortable chair (chair that becomes more and more uncomfortable the longer you sit in it)

Work to do

We still need to finalise our team charter to submit, choose an idea to present, and finalise our presentation for Wednesday. I'm a little bit concerned about how this course is going to be effected by COVID-19 due to its collaborative nature.

Projects that inspired me

When I started thinking about the topic "change through discomfort" I immediately thought about a YouTube Video I recently watched where Michael Reeves made a chair that falls over as soon as you sit on it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIxaGgTY8UM&t=478s). It's quite extreme but I did think it could be funny as a last resort to make the person fall of the chair if they haven’t got up after all the other warnings (i.e. blowing cold air, surround sound screaming, etc.).

World Cafe

This week we did lots of idea generation and concept creation in groups first in world cafe then in our allocated teams. World Cafe broke the class up into small teams seated at individual tables where the group would discuss and evaluate a theme, taken from the presentation ideas. At these tables the theme itself was evaluated and new ideas for this theme were created in a short period of time before the team split up and moved to new tables. At each table one member of the last team would stay to inform the newcomers or 'travelers' of what was discussed last session and to further discussion onto new topics.

Personally I went to tables that interested me, Musical Things, Sassy Tech and Wearable Tech. I would have liked to visit more tables and generate different Ideas however I was selected as the host multiple times as I seemed to grasp new concepts quickly and have a good way of describing them. After these sessions were done we then requested to join groups based off our favourite tables and concepts, mine being the ones above.

Meeting my Team

On the Wednesday of this week we found out our new teams based off our selected concepts and matching timetables, so I joined my team for Sassy Tech, with Lachlan, Zhijang and Shao. We all liked the idea of technology with a personality and worked on mentioning what our interpretations and expectations were, along with writing up a team charter. In the second half of the session, we found a basis for design, using the Hand from the Secret Handshake Lock, and putting it into different applications or to help in other ways.

Here are our inital sketches and ideas for the concept, where I drew lots of different robotic hands and gestures that could be made to give it personality and character. We also had lots of different ideas for the physical appearance of the hand, making it look realistic, or giving it unnerving qualities like extra fingers or multiple thumbs. This can be decided later, as the difference between a metal, flesh, green, extra fingers, elegant, manicured or hairy hand aren't as important as the role it plays and where it will be implemented. This sheet shown depicts some of the evaluation we did as a team to create ideas of where a hand could go, and we narrowed down some of the ideas for feasibility or practicality.

Tuesday-world cafe

During the first session of this week, we did the world cafe in the class. It is really useful to help us brainstorm about different concepts. When doing different title of concepts, many ideas have been inspired by those posters. Through the discussion with different team members, I got more idea about what I am interested to do.

The best topic that I like is the body as the controller, I am thinking to use our body as a controller to create a fitness game. It designs for the people who want to lose weight or people who want to do some more exercise during the daytime. Users can also choose a different hard level.

Then the other that I have is the musical thing. My main concepts about music are to create a physical induction wall. People touch different illustrations can get a different sound. It designs for people who love music but cannot really play it.

The second that I like is emotional totems. Nowadays, more and more people get pressure from outside. These people really need a product to abreact their emotional when people feel sad or angry. We also want to share the happiness when we feel happy.

Team

Finally, our main team topic is music thing. During the first class, we meet on Wednesday. We decided to use the slack to discuss during the outside of class. The unavailable timetable form and team agreement also created by us.

For the concepts: We mainly talk about how should we make sound by the object from daily use as an instrument such as a desk, pen or cup, etc. We also talked about the target audience will be the non-musical people because we are all not really good at playing the music.

Then during the spare time, all of us will think the idea of one concept about one object and sharing it on the slack by Friday afternoon.

World Café was great fun and was a great opportunity to discuss and expand upon the different themes classified by the class last week. There were some interesting developments and discussions during this session, and I thought it was a great extension on last week’s activities. My favourite idea from this session came from the “Improving Mundane Spaces” table, where one of the participants has thought of a dynamic target for urinals to make the bathroom more fun.

After the World Café session, we were asked to preference our favourite themes from 1 – 3 as these would determine our teams for the remainder of the semester. I made my preferences in the following order: 1 – Creative Learning, 2 – Change through Discomfort and 3 – Musical Things. We were also asked to fill out a form to help assist staff in making the right decisions.

On Wednesday it was straight into the remote Q & A session with Bash, a UQ Alumni currently living in London, working as a product designer. It was interesting to hear his journey as a graduate and his experiences in London. As well as the job acquisition process. We were also asked to do a self-reflection exercise, which began with us writing a 50-word summary about ourselves, and eventually ending up with a 1-word summary and having to reflect on what that one particular word meant to us.

We came back from our break and were allocated to our teams arranged by the course staff. I believe the staff have made the right choice and I am excited to work with my new peers, Aizel, Rhea and Summer. We all appear to have met with a good first impression and are motivated to produce a great project by the end of the semester. We have set ourselves the objective of coming up with 3 great ideas each over the weekend and deciding on the best as a team to set as our project. My concern at this stage is the current virus outbreak and how that will affect the arrangements of the course for the remainder of the semester. I hope that everyone remains safe and that there is only a minimal disruption to our studies.

This week we did world cafe and formed into our team. The world cafe exercise is very beneficial in helping us to think deeper and further for each themes. For example, one of the theme - Body as controllers, as it is highly related to movements of the body, it is therefore a useful theme for improving people's health/fitness and increasing interactive experiences.

Overall, world cafe is a useful and meaningful exercise to help designers to think more in depth of each themes and develop better design concepts that might have good impact and contribution to the society in future.

TEAM MOBODY

We have formed into a team of 4, called The Mobody which is the combination of the two words 'Move' and 'Body'. Our theme is Body as controller.

Concept

After getting to know our teammates and drafting out the team charter, we have some discussions and brainstorming on modifying a concept of using fingers to play game, designed by one of our team mate. This round, with a team, we decided to change this game to a fighting jet game where player can use their hands to fly a plane and do some shootings with different hand gestures. This week we will work on defining our concepts, our target audience, looking for more inspirations on interactive games, thinking of possible constraints/limitations and some scenarios that people will want to play our games.

Above figure was a sketch that we have drawn about our game play during the team meeting in the contact.

Next...

We will have to do a pitch next week to inform the class of our team's project!

Potential Concept - Twisted

The team is still ideating for a concept we are willing to pitch on Tuesday. At the moment, the idea revolves around a Twister-like mat connected to a projector screen.

The concept aims to teach primary school students colour theory and active collaboration through problem solving activities. In the case of twisted, it is helping little aliens camoflauge into their home planets.

I think this concept could be really promising and I really like the novel interaction mode (Twister) to promote collaboration and colour theory!!

Team

We formed team this week, and I'm glad I can join the theme of body of controller of my choice and have good teammates! In short, our team decided after a short argument that our team name is MoBody, which is short for Move Body. This is a cool name.

Idea

We finally decided to start a game project from using the hand as a controller. We decided to make a flying shooting game. We think that it is also a very intuitive way to compare the shape of an airplane with our hands so it has almost no learning cost for players. And this sounds a very cool idea for us. We also plan to continue to use bracelets to provide feedback from my original pitch idea. We finally decided to use the right hand to make the gesture of the aircraft, using the direction of the hand to control the movement of the aircraft. And using the left hand to control the weapon than the shape of the gun.

In addition, we also considered the aspect of collective experience. We think that two people can cooperate, one person controls the weapon and the other person controls the aircraft. The two planes can also cooperate with each other in separate screens. Although the latter may have higher costs, because we need to increase the number of sensors.

Inspiration

We were inspired by my pitch Running hand. I ’m glad my team members love this idea. Another inspiration is from Raiden, a classic Vertical-scrolling shooter game.

World Cafe

World cafe provided me with an insight into themes I had not previously considered. Themes such as Change through Positive Reinforcement and Musical Things were able to be developed and extended upon by myself and others at the table. As a result I was able to see them in a new (and really interesting) light.

We were able to develop concepts of themes which I ended up putting as my preferences because of the genuine interest and playful ideas that were pitched (such as the musical grid mat and the tower construction code decipherer - the names may have needed some work).

However, I was still passionate about pursuing Creative Learning. I have always found helping people through education invaluable. So, extending this and being able to explore a problem space in this field is super exciting for me.

Bash

I am so appreciative that we got to talk to a successful designer who wants to help us out!! Bash had some really good points that I had never considered before (like going through a recruiter) and selling yourself as a person who will make your employers life easier.

The one word challenge was also really insightful - stripping yourself down to your core is a very interesting approach to highlight what you want to be synonomous with. Create a brand with that word and stay true to it - I can get behind that idea.

And, of course, one of my biggest takeaways was don't be afraid to move!! It looks so incredibly rewarding to get out of your comfort zone (geogrpahically and mentally) and push yourself to do things you previously thought

Team Formation

I have been really lucky and placed in a creative learning team (first preference!!). I am keen to get to know my team a bit better and start developing our pitch for Tuesday.

Currently, my team is thinking about further developing a colour theory concept. More to come about this soon!!

Week 3 Notes

Wednessday Session, Team Formation -

After allotment into team of four and initial ice breaker, we started discussing about the on top of the head ideas. I think all our team really meshed together (blessing of the spirit animals) and all our ideas were based on two things - a bit of troll to accompany the sassyness and something used in daily life. Below are the rough sketches of the every idea we thought of -

Out of these, my favourite was

• Grammar Teacher - People are given chance to write a grammar sentence and if they get it wrong, every other person who wrote before them gets their sentence wrongly written to match the mistake. I like this because sassyness isn't directly given to the wrong doer but, through the eyes of other people who wrote before them by punishing them.

The week as a whole was success. I got plenty of insights into the ideation process. The week went smoothly and I am anxiously waiting for the next one.

We had the world cafe at Tuesday, which is a great event especially when we can have so many different topic and ideas to talk about. Although we are progressing slowly on some themes because the host actually does not fully understand the content of the previous discussion, so it is not able to continue the content of the previous. Eventually everyone returned to the content of the poster and start gain.

Sometimes I feel more relaxed when I am with familiar people, so I can think of better ideas. I finally met a few familiar classmates on the theme Music of Matrix. So, I thought of a funny idea when I was joking, which is the idea of a bus that use fart sound when people sit down to trick them. Although I do think it is really something I would like to try, I did not choose this theme in the end. Because I think this idea cannot find a suitable human value.

I voted for body as controller in the end, which is also the theme that my pitch was categories to. I think I'm really interested in this theme, especially using vibration and other methods to provide feedback. I hope to find like-minded people Teammates to make things in this field.

World Cafe

This Tuesday we did the world cafe activity where we went around to different tables with different themes and brainstormed about the context, the audience/domain and how we can refine the projects.

It was nice to see different opinions on topics and ideas that I would never have thought of. Through hosting, I found out that even if the first group of people thought that nothing could be added in an idea anymore, another group of people will come and have other interesting ideas to add to it. My favorite idea of a topic was for Musical Things. When I got to the table, there was already an idea of a mat with blocks on it that represents the pitch, volume and rhythm. We tried to upgrade the idea to make it different and more sci-fi. We changed the mat into an alien world landscape with the blocks that the user would stack as buildings. The music timeline indicator is an alien that would run through the buildings controlled by the user to play the song. This would be a nice way of composing music while designing a landscape and interacting with the music.

The topics that I was interested in after the world cafe were Sassy Tech, Musical Things and Creative Learning, which were my preferences for the team formation.

Group Formation

On Wednesday, I got in a team of my first choice - Sassy tech which I am really happy about. In our group, we looked at all the project inspirations related to our theme and the one that stood out the most was the Secret Handshake Lock idea. We thought about taking the arm, giving it a personality and putting it on other things. We also did brainstorming on places where we could attach an arm on.

We then went online to search on existing ideas of mechanical, robotic arms and I found a Youtube channel of a woman named Simone Gertz who is named "the queen of shitty robots". She puts weird robotic arms on things like the Plastic Hand Alarm that wakes you up by slapping you and the Iphone Arms that run away from you. I then got an idea of an arm that helps slaps people away and shoots water out of its fingertips if they got in your personal space.

Four girls in our group and one of us is in IT major, others are all in Interaction design. We are working on the theme Emotion Totems. We had a little chat and then started with our team agreement. Everything went well.

Then we started to do a site map through the three ground of World Cafe materials left. And send works to everyone. Each of us needs to come up with one idea based on this site map with some research support as the inspiration.

Ideation

Based on the site map, I chose

• Transfer emotion from negative to positive.
• Share emotions

these two insights to come up with an idea. I am trying to use the lights' colors of the flower's petals to encourage people themselves to recall the good mood that they had to transfer their negative mood to be positive.

Research

People are easily getting stuck in a negative mood and hard to get out. We only can try hard to do with it. Even in a whole day, there was something great happened, as long as one thing doesn't happen your way, people will only remember this “bad” thing and keep complaining. One of the methods to help people get out of this situation can be someone else leads you to recall what happened is good. In the video, Alison Ledgerwood’s husband leads her focus on the good things happened just by asking her what happened is good today after her complaining. Helping Alison recall the positive emotion she had let her realize that that is actually a good day[1].

And people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred which means positive expression can bring more positive emotional expression and negative expressions can bring more negative emotions.[2] In this case, the idea is to use the flower to encourage people to share their positive experiences with a positive mood.

Reference

[1]A. Ledgerwood, "Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck)", Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck), 2013. [Online]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XFLTDQ4JMk&list=LLmpCwEucudTdeD4EsOO2Jzg&index=3&t=0s. [Accessed: 13- Mar- 2020].

[2]A. Kramer, J. Guillory, and J. Hancock, "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks", PNAS, 2014. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111. [Accessed: 13- Mar- 2020].

Wednesday was when teams were allocated, allowing for the opportunity to meet the people we'd be working with for the rest of the semester. I found my teammates

Who Am BATA - and Course Expectations After the Fact

This is the team.

BATA, an acronym of everyones names, and also a brand of shoes.

Spirit animals

Initially here I'd written about us introducing ourselves, but in hindsight, I realised that keeping that it feels more meaningful to keep that private...

I did learn some interesting things that potentially could affect our projects however, like that one of my teammates enjoys using Ableton, which would be a good opportunity to include music or tunes into some of our interactions, if we choose to, later.

Because we can't completely know what others think, it's sometimes hard to recall that there's a possibility we share more things inb common than might be expected from the surface level. If using ableton is something me and a teammate have in common then, perhaps my conclusion might be that there's other things I have in common with other teammates?

While I'm on friendly terms with dozens of people, I feel like it's unfair to say that I'm friends with them, so perhaps 3850 is more of an opportunity to make new connections, and gain an insight into the world from angles I wouldn't have expected.

Because it's placed so far into the syllabus, there's a sense of... "this is the end" of being here, like a final hurrah before entering the death spiral of the working world - so I'd thought there'd be limited opportunties to engage with people, as everyone grinds away at getting something done before a step into industry..., so the realisation that these opportunities exist leaves me unsure of what happens next

Ground Rules

Before the start of any enterprise, there's expectations to meet. The team discussed both what's considered the "normal" and "safe" situations, things where changes are alright and don't have much impact... and what would be considered "critical" or "urgent", more serious topics that would need to be put to a vote. The conversation from there shifted to the methods to deal with issues.

Timelines, and when people were free, as well as expectations for tardiness were discussed, but we also went over combinations of teammates whose work would overlap with each other at different times. For example, it wasn't possible for every teammate to be working together every day of the week... but we could find a way for us to reliably have combinations of two or three people available to work on the subject outside class hours.

Further, we also had additional meeting times set up, a time of week after studios will have been completed where everyone will have had a chance to grab a short break, and be able to come back to discuss further steps. This way once things get hectic, downtime between our studios and the next time a teammate could work on things wouldnt enter the realm of several days.

Early Ideas

Reflecting on an earlier post, our topic, sassy tech, could be said to be technology that responds to a users actions in a cheeky way... so we started out by brainstorming some examples before a more substantive discussion scheduled to be held on the weekend.

These was a group effort however... so it doesn't feel too fair to discuss the ideas as a whole here, that's almost like taking credit for our collective work...

Instead, I'll just detail some of my interpretation of what we did.

Essentially, the early interpretations of our potential work to address the theme, was that we'd be creating a physical device or ... creature (?) that would respond in an unexpected, cheeky, or otherwise almost malicious way (barring actually harming users).

The intent - surprise, but also potentially frustrate whoever was interacting with the device or creature (or experience), with an unexpected response. For example, a text processor or blackboard, where one person misspelling a word in a paragraph changes the occurence of every word in the document or on the board to be the misspelling, sorta, making fun of the error.

Sarcasm and cynicism played a part to an extent, like a boxing robot that would belittle your punching skills, to act as a sparring partner potentially. Essentially, the interaction doesn't have to be a fun time... there's potentially a chance to add negative reinforcement into it...

Steven also brought up how sass doesn't always have to be negative... which reminded me of how there's always the idea of playful sass - for example, pretending that someone doesn't know how to read when they're about to look at an article - then having a laugh together about it.

Worth revisiting later, but I think for now... I'll look into some examples of sassy tech and serendipitous reactions from academic sources.

World Cafe

On Tuesday's session, we had the World Cafe to find the theme that we are interested in.

In the first round, I was in the Emotion Totems theme group and was the host as well. I was pretty impressed with this theme. We conclude all the ideas' main purposes which are relieving stress and encouraging positive emotion. In the second time of round 1, we kept thinking about what we can do more. Then we thought that we should not only ask people to just express positive emotion, but the problem is also that people may not realize that they have a negative mood, they just hide it subconsciously. In this case, we discussed that we can use the idea of "emotion tracking" to record people's emotions and let them realize that they are not in a good mood, then, recall some beautiful moments to encourage people to change their mood from negative to positive.

In the other two rounds, I went to know about some other themes: Beautify the Self, Enhanced mundane spaces, Musical things, Emotional intelligence and Guided movement. We also got some great ideas from some of the themes. Such as SKYSCRAPER, we discussed using that idea and separate people by different colors of lights in different areas. And if it's using in a whole city that will be really cool.