By going through the Project Inspiration Feedback, I have gotten a few questions (some repeated many times) on the functionality of the shoe.

1. How is the shoe going to get heavier to stop you from walking?

This technology has not been invented but I have thought about how I would prototype it. A large metal sheet can be positioned near the "junk food" and when the user walks near it (on the metal sheet), the shoe will be magnetized to create a "heavy" effect.

2. How is the shoe going to detect the shop?

I guess GPS can be used and a list of shops you want to stop yourself from going can be set before going out.

3. How do you get to walk again?

What I thought was if you try to back up, the shoe will sense it and slowly get lighter.

I also got ideas from the comments on how to make it more effective. For example, instead of just beeping, weird and embarrassing sounds can be played instead. Some also brought up potential safety hazards like falling over and hurting your leg trying to move the shoe. Alternatives to "trick" the shoe were also brought up, like hoarding the junk food at home so you don’t have to buy it outside, taking out your shoe before walking towards the shop, etc. Hoarding junk food at home can't be stopped but maybe an additional function like locking your feet in the shoe and not allowing you to take it out until you get home will help. Comments described this shoe as a good way to support the user by annoying them instead of punishing them.

World Cafe

The theme that impressed me a lot in the world cafe activity was changing through discomfort. It's like using things that make us feel uncomfortable to be the motivation to make some change. During the process of ideation the team members brainstormed what discomfort means to everyone and what we want to change though this. The thing people want to change might be a bad habit like smoking or eating junk food. The thing make people feel uncomfortable might be making some noise or adding some weight on your body. Then we could come up with some interesting ideas applying this topic like a running phone that runs away if you sit for too long with the purpose of promoting people to do more exercise. Or a bracelet stops you when you are going to purchase something you don't really need. It’s fun to think in this way to design some interesting and meaningful stuffs for everyday life.

Team Formation

At first we brainstormed any possibilities for the topic of body as controller. The team members considered about what body part we can use as the controller, including hands, feet, arms, legs, eyes, voice, even the whole body. The team somehow prefer to get rid of making a device with too much wires which may effect the experience of interaction. We aim at making the sensor away from the body as far as possible, so it can achieve body as controller for real. The ideal condition is using camera and Kinect device to capture different motions of players. But we do worry about the technical implementation of this plan. We can also use Arduino kits to detect the physical input as the core of the concept is people's behaviours of interaction.

After coming up with few potential concepts we used concept maps to measure which concept meets the project brief the most. The conceptual idea of our team is a game that arms the player with some super power in the natural environment. When it comes to some natural disasters, the players can easily deal with them by simple motions like clapping hands or waving arms. After which the player will be told what it cost in reality. The meaning of the game is to develop the reverence of the nature.

World Cafe:

In this week's World Cafe, I analyzed the different themes and used them to find inspiration and choose the theme that I eventually wanted to do. After thinking, I chose the body as a controller as my first choice, followed by the creative design theme. Although I really wanted to do my initial design ideas, as a challenge, I wanted to choose a different area as a new development direction, because When analyzing the subject of body as controller, I thought of designing with sound or touch, because the sound is also part of the body. Interacting with sound is a very new way of interaction rather than confining the mind to a certain body. On each part. At the same time, we think of fitness themes, games that help fitness, such as touching the hinted area with your hand in a limited area, similar to the palm touching the ground in aerobics, and allowing users to achieve their goals through physical activity.

Team Meeting ;)

In this Wednesday's group grouping, the topic I was assigned to was Body as controller. Unfortunately, the areas that our group members are good at are design, and programming is the weakest part. But it doesn't matter. I chose this course to improve my programming skills. So in this project, I will do my best to learn programming and raise my programming level to a higher level, and try to implement all the functions in the design as much as possible.

However, because of this epidemic, our group chose online video conferencing and chose Friday afternoon and Sunday morning as our meeting time. But before our final concept was finalized, we fell into a design bottleneck, because we find that the theme of body as controller is somewhat restrictive, especially many of the themes we want to do have been developed by major game companies, etc., which makes us more frustrated.

But then we chose to use brainstorming from different groups (persons with disabilities, developing children's creativity, children with ADHD, children with autism, etc.), body parts (head, eyes, arms) and five different senses: detailed classification (touch, sound, vibration, blinking, etc.) so we ended up with a lot of interesting ideas

IDEAS:

• For children with autism / hyperactivity disorder, this group of children is less willing to express and prefers other ways of expression. Some surveys indicate that writing and drawing can help them to express better, so the idea is to use the left hand to represent the Wipe, the right hand means a paintbrush, children can wave their arms in the air to draw what they want to draw, and then directly display it on the tablet or projection screen. You can maximize your child ’s creativity instead of confining them to a stool.
• There are also children who lack family care. They are more afraid of sleeping alone in the dark, so the idea of this design is to add a temperature sensor to a plush toy to detect the child's temperature, and hug it when the child is afraid At night, the bedside lamp connected to the plush toy will light up slightly, which helps to relieve the child's fear while ensuring that the child's sleep is not affected.
• In the end, a design we determined was about decompression, which is also a design that our group prefers. We followed the design ideas of other groups, and a Smash it poster gave us great inspiration. We added a lot of changes to that idea, so we finally chose boxing gloves as our interactive object. The user took the boxing gloves and waved them to simulate the gesture of hitting the object. At the same time, gloves can indicate the strength of the user's swing according to the strength of the user's swing (feedback is used to determine the strength of the swing and the feedback of the vibration strength given to the user by the vibration sensor) There are many ideas that can be improved, so we will modify this idea in the next few days when we prepare for the speech, and we will modify it in more detail.

We went through world cafe, which is one of my favourite ideation method. We seperate this ideation into 3 rounds which focus on different aspects of our concept, context, target audience, refinement . This a little bit different from what I did before, usually we put the concept sharing similar characteristics together, and sit down to combine or change them to a "new" concept. Although this special change of world cafe allows us to pay more attention on details of the concept, it hard to only change the one aspects without other. The audience group and context is highly related.

Another thing is that there are two different interpretation towards this ideation method. We spend a lot of time to explain to each other to make sure we are in the same page. One is that we should choose a specific idea that we like and develop it. Another one is we can do whatever we want, as long as it belong to this theme. From my perspective, both have the pros and cons. Also learned how to reach a agreement in a short time, ideas are not that important, what matter is how we develop that according to the theory.

Overall, it's an effective ideation method without many constraints, and we do generate some interesting ideas.

Music as metrics(host)

Music playground

this an idea was based on music fountain and the bus composer.

Our target audience changed to the children group. In this music playground, all of the children can play the toy they like to make music. For example string can represent the sound of piano, slides can make shallow sound. although they are playing toy separately, but the melody will be combined together , resulting in an orchestra experience. I do think this really playful and is a transmission way for children to be familiar with classical musical instruments.

I hosted in this table, the second round is about the change the context, the playground setting was changed to athlete centre(including gym, swimming pool and basketball centre). The target audience was athlete. This is concept is also about collective experience, but more appropriately. There is a scenario we generate, a person doing the squat can control the wave of the water in the swimming pool, then his friend can have a different experience of swimming even surfing on this swimming pool. we were so excited to talk about this concept that we lose the core side, music as metrics. although it's a very playful and innovative ideas, there is no music as metrics here . Sticking with essence of the theme is really important.

Digital sensation

My idea "elements" was here, we talked about how to achieve this and make it more feasible.

one of the idea is to combine with VR glass, when the users wearing AR glass and start to do meditation , the glass will show them the natural element like it's raining . that's the easiest to achieve this idea, but I don't really like this, because it's not fun , it's still digital experience , my motivations was to let to get rid of technology to look at them self.

the other idea is a nose piecing which can detach the breath of user. that's kind of fun and gangster style. once the nose piecing connect with the installation it will change the natural elements according to the breath . some elements are easier to get rain and wind, but things like snow and thunder is kind of harder. for the thunder my idea is to use cloud as form, as project the thunder shape on the cloud to simulate those natural elements.

Sustainbility

In this table, I found most concepts more like an advanced technology instead of interactive device like recycling bin which can classify garbage according to the material , smart refrigerator can detect the condition of grocery. What I think really funny is the smart wardrobe which can show you the . And classmates justify that because you can see how you look like with those clothes without buying them, as a result of this clothes production will be decreased. I do think this is a really good point to look at the sustainability. We can give user mental satisfaction to stop them doing certain thing which is not sustainable. This fantasy of having something could be a really good point to be used in persuasive technology. i think persuasive technology would be suitable for the most concept of sustainability. It’s all about how to educate people or inform them the importance of sustainability. In the light of myself, I really think this is a really tough technology, which require various knowledge, neuroscience, public recognition, education and etc. Different people have different mental model which are shaped by their past experience. most persuasive tech remain on really superficial side, positive and negative reactions toward their behaviours. That is really hard to convince users to change their behaviours , everyone have ego especially adult. Even but it will only work for a small group people who share the similar characteristics.

Overall

This a really good ideation method which create a lot of interesting ideas, but it’s really struggling to work with people in round 3”refinements” which require us to make ideas feasible. That’s really hard for me and my classmates , because most of ideas are amazing and ridiculous. And I don’t even have a engineering background.For example It is really hard for me to think about how to connect rain water with breath. Even if we make things feasible, but it will lose it's originality , which cause to be a normal concept.

Well week 3 has been a fun one! From world cafe, to meeting a real product designer (via stream) to getting into our teams, has been a real whirlwind of a week.

What we did

On Tuesday, we had the world cafe session. This involved moving around tables with different themes with a different group of people each time, having a host stay at a table and relay the information from the group before. In the rounds, we generated ideas based off context, and then tried to make them more usable.

My favourite idea was on the music table, where we ended up making a game where aliens battle on top of musical keys, and thus making tunes to battle to.

Hearing from Bash

Was good to hear from a real life designer. Points I took away were to think about who I want to be and what makes me unique. And to take a gamble, trust in a job finder and learn from your mistakes.

Team formation:

Based off of our favourite themes from the world cafe, I chose to focus on Sassy tech. I think it is a creative space and thus have now formed a team with some other fellas who are also interested in the theme.

As a team, we're eager to look into using music as a part of our concept but are meeting up Saturday to further refine our idea.

World café

In this Tuesday’s contact session, we mainly conducted the world café activity, in which we were offered the chance to get a better understanding of others’ ideas and go deeper into different themes. This ideation exercise was split into three rounds, with some mini-rounds focus on different purposes. During each mini-round, we moved around different tables to make sure we could get to know as many different themes as possible.

Round 1 – Context

The first round was about discussing the context of different themes and related ideas by exploring the aims of these ideas, possibilities of how they could be done, etc. Through the relatively surface-level discussion, we were able to be more familiar with others’ concepts and come up with some new ideas. As we were not asked to take constraints into too much consideration, we really got some good inspirations by putting these ideas into different contexts. In the round 1, I stayed at tables with ‘Emotional Totems’ theme and ‘Musical Metrics’ theme. There were some interesting findings around these two themes:

1. Combining some VR/AR technology with emotional design to enhance people’s awareness of mental health
2. Providing portable physical tokens to enable multi-users to collaborate with each other in the music making process.

Round 2 – Audience / Domain

The second round was about discussing the target user groups, possible usage scenarios and human values of the ideas and possibilities generated in round 1. By going deeper into these ideas, we were able to identify what the target audience could be, which situations could these ideas be applied, and what was the most important human values they focused on. In this round, I stayed at tables with ‘Altered Landscapes’ theme, ‘Enhanced Mundane Spaces’ theme and ‘Digital to Physical’ theme. There were some insights from the three themes:

1. Social connection and intimate relationship were things people valued
2. Enhancing people’s interests in mundane spaces should take their motivations into account
3. When design the physical representations of the digital information, design panels can consider the age and physical differences of users.

Round 3 – Refine

The last round was about how to make these ideas more realistic by bring back the constraints and barriers when designing and developing them. During this refinement process, we were able to consider what the realised concepts should be in the near-future and what kind of technologies could be applied when develop them. In this round, I served as both host and traveler of ‘Change Through Discomfort’ theme and ‘Body as controller’ theme. The implications for these themes were:

1. We can combine different interaction modes for our potential ‘systems’
2. When design the ‘discomfort’, consider users’ feeling in different situations is important. (eg: avoid embarrassing them to much in some public places)
3. Providing users with the direct manipulation can make the interaction process more engaging.

Bash Isai:

In the first part of Wednesday’s contact, a previous Phys Comp student, Bashkim Isai were invited by Lorna as the guest speaker to chat with us through Zoom. He mainly discussed some methods to make ourselves ‘unique’ when we try to find a job after graduation. He guided us to conduct an exercise which aimed to help us identify what is the most unique and distinguishable characteristic of ourselves. I had to say this activity was useful, because that helped me reflect on my most valuable aspect, which was the skill I could apply when i entered the job market.

Team formation:

In the second part of Wednesday’s contact, it was about the team formation and allocation. First, we were given time to get familiar with each team member by following some warm-up questions and self-introduction. After that, we created our team charter, assigned the initial roles in the team project, as well as talking about our working strategies.

Team’s initial concept:

We conducted the focus group to discuss our ideas and what the potential projects could be, so that to decide the form of the initial concept and the technologies we may be able to draw on.

The design space of our team is ‘Body as controller’. Our main concept is developing an interactive game that enables users to directly control and manipulate the digital information in the game by controlling their left and right hands, thus obtaining an immersive interactive experience. So, this concept is a gesture-based idea. The user's left and right hand respectively correspond to the shooting tool and aircraft in the game screen.

• For the left hand, users can adjust different types of gestures to adjust different levels of 'attack'. For example, the thumb and forefinger gestures correspond to ‘normal attack’, while the thumb, index finger and middle finger gestures correspond to ‘power attack’, and the thumb and pinky finger gestures correspond to the ‘ultimate attack’.
• For the right hand, users can control different flight modes by adjusting the degree of closure between fingers. For example, if the user's fingers are all closed, then the aircraft is in the level 1 flight mode, indicating the aircraft is flying at the slowest speed, but with the highest shooting accuracy. If the user's index, middle and ring fingers are closed while the thumb and pinky finger are open, then the aircraft is in the level 2 flight mode, indicating moderate flight speed and attack accuracy. And if the user has all fingers open, then the aircraft is in the level 3 flight mode, indicating the fastest flying speed but the least attack accuracy.

Inspirations:

Apart from the ideas generated from the world café session, our initial concept was also inspired by some retro horizontal shooting game. However, when users play these games, they are less likely to directly interact with digital information, and have to control the character in the game by some physical controllers, so we want to provide users with more intuitive operations and more immersive experience by allowing them to use the body as part of the control.

Improvement

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

World Cafe

This week has two major activities which were world cafe followed by team allocation, in world cafe we get to participate in discussions regarding to themes categorised from the presentations we did in week 2, discussions we as groups did were quite freeform, we talked about how the ideas on the table could be something else that enhances certain user experience.

Body as controller was one of the themes (it’s also the theme that I want to pick as my project theme the most) that I was in a group of 5 to discuss about what kind of experience the ideas can stimulate for users, we talked about the social aspect and how it could be better with the example of one of the amazing ideas on the table (glove percussion, it is an idea which users can put on a pair of glove and generate the sound of percussion of different drums with different hand movements / gestures.)

And how the idea that we picked enhances its social aspect? We thought about another way to use it is to allow users to use not only a kind of instrument, but it could also be anything such as electric guitar, bass guitar etc… Besides it allows users to jam a sound as a band remotely without physically being in the same room.

Best news was that I was allocated to “Body as controller” (hooray!!!!), whether the concepts we discussed about in the world cafe will be in our actual project, I am not sure, but definitely It would be one of our inspirations generated as a team.

Team

Congratulations to me to be allocated in a team of 4 working on “Body as controller” which I (sorta) had experience before with Arduino in DECO2300, where I made a glove to controller the left and right in a game.

On the day we were allocated as a team, my other 3 amazing teammates also came up with an potential idea to be presented in week 4 or even picked as our project idea. Which the idea was a game that players can play as a god in a world where he/she could literally destroy/fix anything in sight, the equipments needed are still being considered whether it is to be on VR/AR or just a screen.

We all had experience using Unity, 3D modelling, C#, Arduino and etc, however we are open to learn and adapt new things depending on what out concept will turn out to be, I’ll stay tuned for that.

We are also going to have our first team meeting for the presentation in week 4, where we will talk about the work allocation as well as refinement of the concept that we have developed so far.

Mr. Bash Interview

And then we also had Mr. Bash talking about his experience of getting a job, mindset and tips that we will need after we graduate. This had me actually thought about what is my selling point and uniqueness when I compare myself with other IT/multimedia graduates, definitely it’s not all about technical skills because this is something that there always is somebody who is better, nor it is about your ideas/brilliant mind unless I am going to be an entrepreneur, surprisingly it is more about the simplest thing you can imagine, a likeable personality (which I was not born with and am working on).

accident

Hola Amigos

Tuesday Session, World Cafe -

During the Tuesday session, the students undertook World Cafe activity, where students discussed about aspects of the theme given to them and then rotate to another table. This ideation process was interesting, insightful and a good warm up to interest students in the various themes. Throughout the three rounds, I was intrigued by difference in the people's perspective of the same concept. An example would be mort for Creative Learning, I personally thought that this idea didn't belong in category because it was basically input and output (an inspiration to research about morse code, rather than product actually teaching the morse code), which I wouldn't put in Creative Learning. On the other side, my mates disagreed that inspiration does come under learning. At the end of session, we got to pick the three themes we want to work on. My top choice was - Sassy Tech . This was because humanising a technology and giving it a character looks like an intriguing way to look into people's mind and understanding their characteristics. My second and third choices were respectively bothersome tech and emotonal totems. The reasoning for these is similar to sassy tech, just fiddling with human physchology.

World Cafe

In week 3, we did the world cafe activity. I have done this before in the course of deco7180. For me personally, this activity has helped me a lot. By providing a lot of different topics, it leads me to think about some good ideas. At the same time, during the group discussion, everyone brainstorming together is very helpful to come up with novel ideas.

Meet Team Numbers

I also meet my team numbers in week 3, which is very excited. Our team members are very good, some are good at design, sometimes good at drawing, some are good at programming. I am very confident in our team, I think we can complete our project well. Because we have members who are good at different fields.

The theme chosen by our group is change through discomfort. In the following group discussions, we discussed this topic in depth, and also came up with many interesting ideas, such as annoying clock and magic mirror.

Big Problems

One of our team numbers dropped this course. However, it is fine for me, but i do not know if other team numbers think so.

Re-submission

The previous idea I submitted lacked the novelty component and I spoke too long about the concerns rather the things that the idea could achieve and what it would be used for.

The new idea is a kinetic bracelet which encourages human activity away from our tech devices. This would work by having sensors in the bracelet that build up kinetic energy overtime from doing everyday activities such as working out at the gym, hanging out clothes, cooking and writing. After this there is a charging component to the bracelet that is universal to wireless devices so when you touch your devices they will begin charging.

The focus for this product is to eliminate being lazy and just sitting on your computer or phone all day without actively engaging and achieving other important tasks in your life. It will no longer be possible to just ‘binge’ Netflix or play games all day without being useful first.

World Cafe

This week's contact session was in the format of a world cafe where we got to explore different themes and discuss them in a group. I got to about 5 different tables and hosted 2 times which was interesting. From the different tables I found the bottom two to be the most interesting as there is a lot of interesting themes that came out through discussion. The two images below are for Enhanced Mundane Spaces and Everyday Sustainability which shows a few great ideas.

Group Work

At the second contact session of the week, the first part was spent listening to a former student, Bash, who now lives in London. He spoke to us about his experience in the industry and more specifically about how to get jobs and what companies are looking for.

After this we were given our assigned groups that we were to work with for the rest of the semester. I was lucky because I got a few mates in my group and I know that they are very creative and have many great ideas from previous semesters in IT.

The topic we all chose as our #1 preference was Enhanced Mundane Spaces. When doing the world cafe it seemed like ideas were flowing much easier than when we started to brainstorm as a group. We talked about

• Buses
• Classrooms
• Elevators
• Walking on Paths
• Stuck in Traffic

We still haven't made our final decision but are leaning towards creating the Elevator space more fun and interacting and overall an enhanced experience.

We read through the poster from World Cafe, captured the key insights from the opinions on it. We grouped the insights into themes that provide further information for the next round of ideation after the group pitch.

Following characteristics are raised from the well-established consensus [1] which influencing family functioning:

· Parents actively build self-esteem in their children through compliments and demonstrating affection

· Family members actively listen to each other

· Family members argue without wounding each other (i.e. relying on the merits of an argument rather than personal attacks)

· Engage in family activities that all members enjoy

· Parents have time to spend with their children

A healthy language environment and a quality company contribute to a positive family functioning. It is interesting that from the above characteristics, we can see both “compliments and demonstrate” and “ argue” which are opposite but also compatible with each other. The argument is not easy to be controlled compares to compliments, which asks for awareness of the boundary of a positive argument for family members. It is the first point that I want to work on, which can be adapted in my project aims to assist family members in managing and controlling the argument level.

From the study of work-to-family conflict [2], which “boundary theory” suggests a cognitive, physical, and/or behavioral boundaries (“fences”) may exist between individuals’ work and family domains. It proves that without a clear boundary, family members will easy to bring the affections from work to home. It leads to a magnification of the details of despair in family life. It is the second point that I want to include in my project. I want to help users prevent amplifying the negative emotion which brings from work at home.

[1]National Drug Strategy (Australia), Australia, and Department of Health and Ageing, Training frontline workers: young people, alcohol & other drugs. Australia: publisher not identified, 2004.

[2] Z. Chen, G. N. Powell, and J. H. Greenhaus, “Work-to-family conflict, positive spillover, and boundary management: a person-environment fit approach,” Journal of Vocational Behavior, vol. 74, no. 1, pp. 82–93, Feb. 2009, doi: 10.1016/j.jvb.2008.10.009.

World Cafe

Beginning the week with World Cafe was quite exciting. I had already done a form of this in DECO3500 and quite enjoyed the activity, so it was great to be able to do this again with a variety of different topics. In my previous journal post I listed some of the themes that I was interested in exploring, so this activity gave me a chance to do that, as well as meet more people in the class.

The topics that I had a chance to explore were Change Through Discomfort, Change Through Positive Reinforcement, Emotional Totems, Sassy Tech, Bothersome Tech and Creative Learning. Throughout this activity I hosted twice, which was exciting however it would have been nice to see some other people step up to host so that I could explore one last topic. In saying that though, it did allow me to take on a slight leadership role, which is something that I have been trying to improve upon.

After exploring these topics and brainstorming some weird and wacky ideas, the top four topics that really intrigued me were Change Through Discomfort, Change Through Positive Reinforcement, Sassy Tech and Bothersome Tech. I definitely think the themes that I'm interested in overlap in some way which I found quite interesting.

Chatting With Bash

To continue the week, former UQ graduate Bash Isai, chatted to the cohort online all the way from London. It was really interesting to hear his experiences and he gave us some valuable tips on how to get a job. I had come across the idea of job recruiters as my partner has one of his own but I didn't realise how easy and useful they could be. I definitely am going to be looking into finding myself a recruitment agent!

He also conducted this insightful activity which began with us writing 50 words about ourself, and then continuously cutting it down until we had three words. From those three we had to select the one that best represented us. The three that I ended with were unique, genuine and exceptional, however I thought that genuine was the word that best encompassed myself and my attitude as a whole.

Meeting The Team

It was finally the day to meet the team! I'm happy with my team as I've never had the opportunity to work with any of them and so far it seems like we've been getting along well. We do all struggle a bit with programming though so that should be quite interesting, although we've made an agreement to work on any kind of programming bits together. I got my first preference of Change Through Discomfort which is awesome, meaning that I'm excited to get into the course!

We dived straight in, coming up with a team name (Negative Nancies) and listing out potential bad habits to explore. Through this process, we placed a tick next to ideas that we thought would be interesting to pursue as they seemed more suitable for the semester project.

We further pursued some of these ideas, exploring potential interactions that could be possible ideas to target throughout the course. As we brainstormed, the topic of implementing discomfort towards sitting down for too long looked promising. We brainstormed quite a few fun ideas for it, so it's looking like this may be what we decide to explore! We currently haven't decided upon what characteristics we want to implement in the chair, but with the next assessable coming up in less than next week, we should have a drafted idea soon!

A social robot that consists of a knife, app and "scanner" for use in the kitchen, to improve your cooking skills. An increasing amount of people have trouble learning to cook the later it is that they start[1], and this idea intends to be an intervention into that space.

Select your recipe, then simply go through it step-by-step until the meal is complete. As you progress through cutting things apart to use for cooking, an LED indicator on the knife, and the "face" (and speaker) on the scanner indicate if you're "doing it right".

The scanner and knife sensors record your actions. Afterward, you review what you've done against what was expected of you, on your smartphone. This pushes the cook to consider what they can improve on the next time they work on the same meal.

This concept focuses only on the aspect of cooking using the knife correctly (for now), and because there's a variety of ingredients one might cut, it wont be a single use tool, unlike the initial concept.

Project Inspiration

When previously volunteering at a homeless shelter, a common issue is that older volunteers need to teach new ones how to cook. This led me to the thought - surely there's apps and tools already developed to do just this?

Cooking Mama is a game game that teaches one how to cook. However, it only teaches the steps to take, and doesn't improve your physical dexterity and safety awareness with cooking tools.

Previously I stated the idea of "smart cooking tools doing everything for you" being something I wanted to avoid, I've found an example of one here. Sure, the Kuvings blender makes it extremely easy to cook and disassemble materials... but there's no room to make a mistake or chances to fail... it just feels like the blender replaces you.

At the same time, Peeqo inspired the scanner, with the idea of a small device that watches you and has reactions that can change how you act... it sasses you essentially.

With Rekaptured, the idea is that you go on cooking as you always have, and there's additions to your process that don't overwhelm you - and the opportunity for you to mess up your meal. You're collaborating with the tool to complete a somewhat complex task.

Initially the concept revolved around the knife talking to you. But cooking environments can be loud and chaotic, it was important that feedback had both a visual and audio indicator (angry and happy tones on scanner), and, that if there was talking, it could be ignored while cooking.

Feedback also needed to be able to be revisited later. In this case, if a mistake is made, the scanner and knife react, so the cook knows to check the app later to see what went wrong, and can reflect.

[1] (Background reading on learning to cook)

F. Lavelle et al, “Learning cooking skills at different ages: a cross-sectional study,” International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, vol. 13, no. 1, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-016-0446-y

Meet and Greet

Today we get to finally meet our teammates, it was kind of interesting to see we can work together as a group and the best part was, I get to work on a theme that I am really interested in. Seeing so many students that are interested in Creative Learning, I am excited to see what ideas we can produce by the end of the semester!

What is creative learning to me ?

Creative learning to me is finding new ways to learn instead of learning something through the old fashion way, we can do something that is fun and imaginative to promote creative learning. I like to learn things using fun and creative techniques to constantly keep my brain engage.

Team Discussion

After the team discussion, we have decided to find out how we can incorporate creative learning using technology to help kids/people to learn and also to manage mental health conditions. The product that we are planning to design will help them to improve their motor skills and will enhance their intelligence through Synchronized Learning (Using both left and right brain).

This is the product characteristics that we are currently looking at :

• Plush toy
• Having similar inputs to the bop it toy (Motor Skills)

1)Pull it

2)Twist it

3)Push it

4)Flick it

5)Smash it

Motor Skills Inspiration : Bop it Toy

Inspiration from Bubbles the Helping Hand

Bubbles the Helping Hand

This product helps to detects the level of the child’s anxiety and it incorporates motor skills to help the children to learn. The eyes of the soft toy helps to scan text and read to the child and there is a touch sensor to help to detect the anxiety level of the child. It is cool to see how a simple toy can have functions that can help with children’s learning and manage their mental conditions.

What I plan to do next ?

• Finding more inspiration that is related to creative learning
• More in-depth research on synchronized learning
• Other ways to make a product more interactive that require motor skills

Today we did a collaborative exercise called World Cafe where we get to generate starting points for team projects and share our thinking and experience to the group so that we can connect ideas together to come up with new ones. This method is particularly useful for me when i want to explore a theme. This process not only helps me to break down my thought process but it has helped me make connections with new people.

Round 1 : Enhanced Mundane Spaces

Definition of Mundane

• Boring and dull
• Everyday things

Examples of Mundane daily things provided by the group

• Children packing bag the night before
• Children find it hard to play muscial notes
• Tying Shoe lace
• Sharpening a pencil
• Learning how to drive

Round 2 : Change Through Discomfort

Who are we designing for ?

• People With Bad Habits
• Introverts
• People who wants to change their habits

Experience we are designing

• Uncomfortable Experiences
• Forces to finish tasks

Where can we apply this ?

• Home
• Safe environments
• Public spaces
• Work environments

We looked at how can we design for people to change through discomfort and here are some of the ideas :

1)In School (Motivating people to achieve goals)

Using visual elements to indicate the effort of the user that has put in (Like a Pen)

2) Motivating people to wash a dish

Sensor to detect if the sink is full of dishes, if the sink is full of dishes an alarm will sound of to the neighbours.

Round 3 : Guided Movement

Critique:

This week we worked further on ideation with a stricter focus on the themes extracted from the theming exercise we completed last week. We also received our project inspiration grades and critiques. I received a pass which I am obviously pleased with. My critique from Lorna was: "I can imagine this being used proactively as well as reactively (mindfulness and meditation). Sound could be an addition to explore". This gave me some food for thought about how I could develop the idea to increase the situations in which it could be used. As in my pitch, the interactive stress ball was intended to be predominantly used when the user it prompted. This could be altered so that it can be proactively used as well when the user recognises that they are stressed and wants to calm down. The other comment mentioned the exploration of incorporating sound into the concept. In my presentation I did include that there would be sound emitted from the ball when it starts pulsing although I didn’t go into much detail about this. I intended this sound to be similar to the soundtracks used in meditation and mindfulness tracks to assist with the goal of relieving stress.

UQ Innovate Induction:

At the start of the week, I completed the UQ Innovate induction. This was good for me as I now know the equipment available to us for the semester and can better understand what my capabilities and limitations are for constructing the project. First we went through the hand tools and learnt how to operate the bandsaw, drill, sander, bead blaster etc. We also were shown the paint shed which will come in handy as I am sure I will have to paint some element of my project. Finally, we completed the laser cutting induction and learnt how to upload the files and print on various programs such as CAD, Illustrator and Carell draw. We discussed some of the safety concerns such as what to do if a fire breaks out and which materials to use.

Reflection:

So far I have actually found it quite hard to come up with concepts that use novel forms of interaction. The studio activities have definitely helped me in broadening my ideas of potential phys comp concepts. I also gained a lot of help looking through some of the concepts posted to the #inspiration channel on slack. I had a lot of fun looking into sci-fi technologies that made appearances in TV shows and movies.

I will continue trying to find sources of inspiration to aid in the ideation process over the next couple of weeks.

Until now, I was concerned that the main issue with my project inspiration was the interaction, or the tool itself - but on speaking to Lorna it's actually about what happens around the tool instead, the activity. What does this let you do?

So, instead of the interaction (the knife responding to you) being unacceptable, I really just needed to focus on the detail and process. I suppose in this case, it wasnt worth throwing out most of the things that made the tool real, but I've placed an emphasis on trying to deal with

What I had before - You have a kitchen knife, pick it up, and it keeps track of three things, proper grip, a safe angle, and a appropriate amount of force. But none of those had specific interactions, so I'll be working on storyboards for those, demonstrating how the interactions flow in greater detail. The important things, there's a clear piece of feedback, thats both visual and auditory, and then after the fact, there

Theres an issue here of a potential Gulf of Execution and Evaluation with the way the interaction is right now - someone might use the tool - but they wouldn't know what exactly they did wrong, because snarky comments from the tool aren't a substitute for detailed feedback.

I've talked about the context of the tool now being something to use to train new volunteers at a homeless shelter, to stop them from making mistakes... I think the next step is to think of a place to use it... is it going to be something that people use at home? Or is it a tool for a warm up exercise? It's kinda sad if it's just a one time thing - and then the knife is unusable.