About Me

Hi there! I am Kasey (Qisi) Zheng, I am in my last semester as a Master of Interaction Design student. My previous academic background is Bachelor of Commerce, but I'm not really a fan of the finance industry after done my internship at a reinsurance group. So I decided to put my passion into something could help people to live a better life, to increase the humanity and little happiness in their daily lives when using something I designed. Therefore I wish I could pursue a life long career to achieve these goals, as a UX designer, product manager or whatever the job title will become in the following decades. Because I believe this is the kind of job could never be replaced by AI, robot or any future technology.

I have been being a "vagrant" living in Japan, England and Australia since I was 18. After experienced different culture environment and working with great people from different backgrounds, I appreciate every single chance here at UQ to design something for different group of people. Although I hate to describe myself in a short sentence, I will try to write something to help you know about me. Since I'm a Capricornus(sorry to bring up horoscope here), I consider myself as a detail-oriented, practical person. I might be a little bit conservative or put too much attention on details sometimes, but I'm totally open to listen to different opinions from others. I'm also a self-discipline, determined person when it comes to work. I have a strong sense of responsibility for both individual and group work, I will always make sure finish the work assigned to me with high standard of quality and help other team members of they need help to work together on our project. Finally, I might be a little bit quiet sometimes, it probably because I am searching for something or having a little debate in my mind (definitely not in a daze or don’t want to talk with you).

Expectation of this course

I've been to the exhibition last year, it's really entertaining, exciting and inspirational. I wish when it comes to our turn, we will be confident to let our "baby" to make the debut. Sine this is going to be last semester and also only course besides the thesis. I'm all in and I want to make the best of my talent, skills and everything I've learned so far into it. I'm also being exciting for the craft work. So far I've got the chance to make something by either laser cutter, 3D printer and other wood working machines in my life. In the previous DECO courses we were more focusing on user interface making on digital screens. So this would be a good chance I finally could combine those skills all together.

Here's a list of what I would like to challenge myself in this course:

• Try my best to think out of the box. Since I am a detail-oriented, practical person, sometimes my ideas are restricted by certain rules and frameworks. Therefore I wish I can constantly breakthrough myself during the whole process in this course.
• Keep struggling with the coding part. To be honest coding the most weak part among all my skill, but I never give up on it. Although I'm a slow learner when comes to coding, I'll keep pushing myself to learn as much as I can to contribute to the team.
• The sufficient task,time and team management skills, to minimize the gap between anticipation and action and conquer the procrastination.
• The communication skill, not only for oral pitch/presentation, but also for essential documentations to let audience understand the thing we are creating. While I was doing my internship during the summer holidays as a product manager in a start-up, I first actually feel the important role of a essential, clear PRD(Product Requirement Documentation). Because this is the bridge communicate my design among different departments with software engineers, business analysts and everyone is going to work in the project. It's my responsibility to make sure everyone read this document will get the same vision and understand what they need to do for their job.
• Keep working on overcome the confidence gremlins. Although I'm not a people person and be more comfortable in a small group of people, I will try to become more confident when speaking in front of the crowd. Also I'll try to speak out more for my opinion and different ideas when it comes to a discussion for important decision.

All in all. I am looking forward to work with brilliant people who want to put their hearts in the project, working hard as a team to build something innovative, amazing and hopefully could provoke some rethink of the world for the people who’ve been interacting with it.

Warning!

It might be lots of personal thoughts and experience here in the journal post throughout the course. Because I find it's quite useful for me to organise my thoughts during the design process. And when I look back the journal posts for the Studio1 course in last semester, I can see the growth of myself. So just skip all those things off you find they are boring. ;)

#The 7 grand challenges

On our table, we were focusing on Challenge 7: Social Organisation and Democracy. Following the discussion questions we had discussion cover each subtitles in this chapter. Here's the reading notes I made while reading append the group discussion outcome on the table:

Some of my ideas: I agree with the active citizen participation and open data are the important factors we need working hard with to achieve the goal of design a system for all citizens and even non-citizens to be usable, accessible and useful. However I don’t think equal fully access to engagement is only barrier here. Because it is impossible to reach equal engagement, equal access to all the source. The people who make decisions for design can hear the different voices from different groups of people. But apparently they choose to ignore these voices and still work for some certain classes or interest groups. The news stream we read, the information we received everyday has already filtered by algorithms based on certain standard and purpose. Even we got the full access to those information, we are still not 100% information freedom. Here as a design challenge, I believe design is the only answer to solve or at least to narrow the gap by designing product for certain group of people to solve their problems. Just like there is no cure for all the people on the earth, we cannot design something to benefit everyone on the earth to achieve "design democracy" in one step. But we could try our best to help as much as people to design something based on their needs and expectations to Infinite close to "design democracy".

# Ideation activity in the class

This is a brand new ideation method for me, the idea of utilizing poker is a brilliant fun idea!So far we've been trying so many different kinds of ideation methods, but sometimes they didn’t work and get really bored...But this method is both entertaining and sufficient, I would like to use this for the team brainstorming next time.

Here are ideas generated during the session in class:

Benefits:

- Theoretically there should be 13x13x13x13=28561 possibilities by utilizing the poker to generate random key words for ideation, it gives us more choices to filter a great idea.

- This ideation method is much better than some methods I've been trying so far. There's one method called “semantic intuition” is similar to this method. It asking participants to put words together from each of the categories to think differently. However, that method doesn’t give meaningful definitions for each categories. That makes it different to com up with ideas based on the given words. But this method gives specific definitions for each kind of card "design for/to", "place", "interaction mode" and "interaction quality" to form a complete meaningful sentence. This makes the brainstorming much easier for us.

- this ideation method is perfectly for a group of people conducting brainstorming together. I got inspired other people's ideas and helped myself to come up with more ideas from different angles. Some of the ideas I might never come up with only by myself. This is process each individual get affected by the other and affect others again by their idea.

Drawbacks:

- The group brainstorming session by using this method is more beneficial for me than the individual one. Because I was kind of trapped in my mindset instead of jump out of the box to think from different aspects. It's hard for me to break down my original recognition of the world and objects to think of something completely different. So form my perspective, this method is definitely not a good one for individual ideation. It did help me a little at the begging when I got the cards, but it didn’t help me much in the following process.

- The semantic representation for each card is totally based on personal understanding of that word, which based on very personal experience. By this I mean I am deign something for myself to solve the problem I met in my life experience rather than design for a certain group of users for their common problem in life. For example, when I get the cards stands for "design for conceal/concealing from the amphitheater" my first understanding for this is "to help someone run away from the awkward social situation at an amphitheater". Apparently this assumption is based on my personal experience that easily getting nervous, anxious, uncomfortable when being at a new social environment. On the other hand other people at our table may consider it as "to get rid off someone annoying at the amphitheater", based on their memory when attending the last social event.

- Personally, I would suggest to give the background information including target user, goal, pain point and other essentials for the group before the ideation. In this way, participants will have a common vision of what they are aiming for, so that they can go wild within a shared framework. It's better to have a goal to do anything, right?

#Progress in inspiration hunting

I choose to use Notion as the tool to collect the project I'm interested and may affect my design concept. I have categories them into 8 themes so far, and I'll continue searching for more inspiration during the following weeks. I'll also post some interesting inspiration video directly in next week's journal.

I'm the link to Qisi's Inspiration Wall

See you guys soon! :)

This week really went in at full (ludicrous) speed.

The main focuses of this week were an introduction to the course, and a close look at physical computing (as the course name indicates).

Wednesday

The second day looked at ideation in groups, in preparation for our poster and pitch next week. We started off with discussions about the Seven HCI Grand Challenges; I was assigned to Well being, Health, and Eudaimonia. The reading went into detail about the intentions of technology focused on the well being of individuals whether it be their physical or mental health, but raised concerns about a number of matters.

We discussed the positives, negatives, and examples of this challenge, and how we might change it, as pictured above.

In the second session, Awais introduced a technique for ideation that he wanted to test for his studies. It comprised of creating a sentence describing a need and conceptualising ideas (feasible or not) to cater to it.

There were three parts to the activity - the first was as a group (pictured above), the second was done alone, and the third part (also pictured above) was a reiteration of the first one. This really brought about some wild and incredibly interesting ideas, and got me thinking out of the box. I personally believe that I have trouble coming up with new and intriguing ideas, but this activity really helped advance my thought process and get my brain going. I did have some difficulty in coming up with some ideas myself, especially when it came to the second part of the activity.

The domain was rather difficult to work with and honestly alluded to the concept of eternal death, which resting underwater usually leads to. However, in the desperation of wanting to complete the activity, I managed to twist my perception of the target sentence, and come up with a few ideas. The activity was incredibly helpful in understanding different novel interactions, and how literally anything can be created in so many domains, even if they sounded a bit ridiculous.

One idea that was brought to my attention was the fuzzy sand - while it seems a bit dumb (in simple terms), it did make me think a bit about mental health (which happens to be on a mind a lot) and kind of bringing ourselves to be aware of our surroundings. Picking up sand and experiencing something that contradicts your expectations is typically something shunned in design computing, however with the right intention it can be something really interesting. Whether that's simply creating confusion or intrigue in users, or even going as far as being used as a device for those with trauma to bring themselves back to reality. Picking something up, having the sudden feeling of "gosh, this is weird and not what I expected", can really pull you out of a traumatic memory and focus you on the bizarre experience. Furthermore, it would be

As one might have picked up, I've always been very big about mental health, and the different activities and the challenge I read about has felt relevant to me on a personal level, and I believe there's still a need for improvement on the societal level. These different activities allowed me to look at ideas and concepts from different perspectives - whether that's twisting my own, or from my peers. It's helped broaden my own mind about what is possible or can further be explored.

Preparations

This course involves building a product which may require some key manufacturing skills and the knowledge of the equipment. To provide us with the best chance of being able to create our products in a safe both safely and as accurately as possible we are required to complete 3 inductions. The first induction I completed in O-Week of Uni which took place at the Maker Space workshop. Our two guides were Blair and Grant who were very experienced in their field and showed us how to use some of the machinery that we will most likely want to utilize in our construction. I have used most of the equipment before however it was really interesting to see how the laser cutter worked and just how accurate it was when cutting. Although not related to the course as such but the 3D printing stations all around the workshop were also awesome to watch and see what they create.

Week 1

Tuesday

In our first class on Tuesday, the start was mainly all about what would be involved in the course and answering any questions or queries we had. It was great to do this because most of us haven’t taken a 4 unit course before so it was helpful to understand how the workload increases and also what will be expected of us compared to the regular 2 unit courses that we have done for most of our time at university. Being one of the final courses for my IT degree it seems as if we are putting all our prior knowledge from other design courses into one final product which we will hold an exhibition for at the end of the semester. This will include schools and industry professionals coming in to see how our product works. While this sounds a bit overwhelming it should be a great opportunity to show off our skills and see what awesome gadget we can create in our groups.

Wednesday

Wednesday’s class started to become more hands on with developing inspiration for designs that would be required over the next couple weeks. We got into groups to talk about our challenge that we were given and the group I was in did “Human Technology Symbiosis”. It was actually really interesting to listen to other group members and a key point that we discovered was that to improve technology we need to provide it with data, in the form of machine learning etc but at the same time we are not willing to share this data to maintain privacy. Also, there were many positives and negatives about Tech – Human Symbiosis. One point I made was with targeted advertising and how its purpose is to help you find what your looking for and for companies to reach you but many times it goes way overboard such as looking one thing up online and then all you see for the next week is that product and any tiny little spinoffs of it. It seems to be a case of where you draw the line and what we must expect in the future when the ability of technology increases. After this exercise we went to new groups and played a game with cards where each suit represented a different topic, eg. Design or quality of.. It was really enjoyable and we came up with a lot of funny sentences out of the words that we were given.

Looking Ahead

Next week looks to be quite busy as we all have to complete an idea that we started to develop at the end of class on Wednesday. This needs to be an idea with a physical component attached to it. I have started to come up with a few ideas but still need to explore the possibilities of them working and ultimately do more research. I will post back next week in more detail on the idea that I present.

DIGPHOTO

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Description:

Most of us have photos on our smartphones. Based on Gigaom’s research (2015), each person has about 630 photos stored in smartphone, and people take 150 new photos and 6 videos during a given month. These photos contain a number of memories: touching moments, beautiful things, unpleasant fragments, and enjoyable stories. They record the past and present. However, how many of us would revisit the photos again we took few months or years ago? Actually, photos are helpful for people to recall their happiness memories (Rubin, 2013), and positive memories can reduce the risk of mental illness such as depression (Harmelen, 2019). So, what I want to do is to alleviate negative emotions by retrieving positive memories from photos in smartphone. I formed this idea called DigPhoto.

Assume that user’s photos in mobile device have been stored in this machine. As you can see on the bottom of the poster, it is a rectangular machine with a screen on the top where has five emotion bars. Each one of it has a corresponding colour and a name on the surface. Based on user’s current emotion, he/she can place any items such as coins on the corresponding emotion bar. The weight of the items placed on the bar determines the intensity of the emotion. For instance, if a user feels depressed, then he can place something he has on the bar with depression. After that, all emotion bars would be invisible, and based on the selected emotion and its intensity, the filtered photos/videos (e.g. pleasant moments) would be displayed on the screen, and trying to reduce the feeling of the negative emotion. When his/her emotion is getting stable, he/she can gradually take out the items, and the style of the photos/videos would tend to be more relax and stable. Finally, the screen will back to the initial state after remove all items on the bar, which means user’s emotion becomes stable.

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Research links:

https://gigaom.com/2015/01/23/personal-photos-videos-user-generated-content-statistics/

http://theconversation.com/recalling-happy-memories-can-reduce-depression-risk-in-vulnerable-teenagers-new-study-109742

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/photographs-can-boost-your-happinessb3210947

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/12-trillion-photos-to-be-taken-in-2017-thanks-to-smartphones-chart-2017-8?r=US&IR=T

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Poster:

Hi, my name is Zebing. This is my third year of information technology. I am taking user experience design and software design.

I took two DECO courses last semester, and I knew physical device building such as microcontroller and hand tools is one of important parts in user experience design. However, I am still unfamiliar with physical device building, so, I hope I have more chances to learn it in this course, and by the end of this semester, I hope I would form a basic knowledge of how it could be done/ implemented in different cases. Also, this course is the last course in user experience design, and it involves the implementation of all knowledge we have experienced/ learnt before, so, I take it as a challenge that to check whether I have formed a series of knowledge for the UX and UI design such as user research, investigation, prototype design, programming, testing, and evaluation. So, I hope I can figure out which part also need to be improved in order to achieve a strong foundation of this major. Last thing is to improve team cooperation/work. I hope I have more chances to interact with team members with different knowledge background and culture background.

Examples of physical computing

In the class on Tuesday, according to the needs of the course content, I found a website, (https://sunnie-sva-physicalcomputing.tumblr.com/）, which contains 7 physical interaction cases. One of the things that interests me the most is a musical glove. After users put on this glove, when they make different gestures, different music will be produced. In addition, you can control the pitch, frequency, and volume through gestures. To a certain extent, this is a complex and complete physical interaction project. If the user is proficient, this will be a great composer.

7 HCI grand challenges

After class, I also read Seven HCI Grand Challenges and took some notes. I found that among the 4 different challenge directions I read, several challenges are repeatedly mentioned: users' over-reliance on technology / emotional issues that may arise; paying higher learning const to master the technology; human individualized demand for technology. In addition, in each sub-theme, there are also some directions that have potential and need to be explored. At the same time, these development directions are also relatively lacking in current technology.

In class, I was assigned to a discussion about Well-being, Health & Eudaimonia. Our group discussed the positive and negative impacts that challenges may have on people and technology development. In addition, we also proposed some changes that we thought might exist, but the article did not mention the changes.

Ideation

After the group discussion, we brainstormed in the form of a card game. This game is the hardest way to generate ideas I have ever done because in the process it is difficult to connect 4 different part-of-speech words together to form an interesting idea. For a long time, everyone's minds were blank, or they were always limited by some ideas that they had previously thought of. Another reason for the difficulty in generating ideas may be that the ideas generated in this way are often difficult to apply in practice, or there is no realistic contrast, so the ideas that are generated are often wild.

In the third round of the game, since we have had another silent time to think for ourselves, everyone shared different ideas in this session. Some of these ideas are very interesting. For example, in a gym, the emotional connection between two people can be enhanced through movements. This really gave me a lot of inspiration and made me understand that the design needed for this course does not necessarily need to be confined to real life, but it needs to be sufficiently innovative and interesting.

Work to do

I don't have any inspiration for the project at the moment, so I'm going to look at a lot of creative examples on Monday and use some methods that can stimulate ideas. I found some methods online (https://www.ignitec.com/insights/five-ideation-techniques/), hoping that it can help to generate ideas. After I got creative, I planned to use the mind map method to combine all the bits and pieces that flashed in my mind and display them in the form of pictures. More importantly, listening carefully to the opinions of other speakers in the next Tuesday and Wednesday speeches is very useful for me to develop ideas.

The Work Done

Tuesday

On Tuesday we started with the expectations, challenges, excitements, and rumours for the course. This activity scared me but also reassured me a lot for this course. I had heard this course was a lot of work but so much fun and this really seemed to resonate with the whole cohort. I’m really excited for the exhibit and generally for the whole course. Going into this subject I was quite nervous that I wouldn’t be prepared enough as I’m not the most confident programmer, but seeing that everyone is the same and Lorna saying that as an IT student I am a developer, I feel much more relaxed and eager to build my skills throughout the semester.

We then began researching into some examples of interactions that already exist. I really enjoyed this task as I think the name “Physical computing and interaction design studio” is very broad and somewhat confusing to understand. Seeing others examples of this idea really showed me how broad it actually is and how many different interactions come under this same theme. I think I had a narrow mindset of what counts as “physical computing and interaction”, but after this activity, I’m really excited to see what ideas we all come up with and present next week.

Work that Inspired/Interested Me: Something that I found during this session and that inspired me this week was an interaction by the MIT media lab called Tangible Cityscape (https://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/tangible-cityscape/). I currently work for a small transport consultancy and have constant interaction with multiple different types of demographic data which can be difficult to contextualise. I think this idea is a very interesting topic to explore as I haven’t really seen anything like it before and can see how it could be applicable in an everyday setting for those working in that field. This has kind of extended my interest in exploring under-explored domains for our team project.

Wednesday

This week we started with the 7 HCI Challenges, with our team focusing on Human-Environment Interactions. I found this topic particularly interesting as we started discussing just the basic challenges such as classifying different user types in the environment to then discussing the dark side of these interactions. In particular, the issue of security challenging how invasive an interaction should be. We also discussed the importance of finding the line between an experience that is intensive to one that is invasive.

We then did the ideation activity with playing cards. Even though the task was sometimes very difficult, I thought this process was very cool and helpful to begin thinking outside the box. I came up with the following ideas during the individual rounds.

1. Design to rehabilitate in the village using contract with the quality zero gravity

• Rehabilitate - restore to health, bring back to current condition
• Village - community
• Contract - promise, decrease in size, commitment, understanding
• Zero gravity - floating, comfortable (zero gravity chair)

Ideas:

• Something set up in the city centre - People have to keep a weight perfectly balanced (if someone leaves, another person has to replace them - contract) which will water a plant bringing it back to life = bringing people together and rehabilitating a plant (rehabilitate)
• Something that brings broken families back together -

1. Design to empower in the village using fire with the quality forever

• Empower - self-confidence
• Village - community, school
• Fire - burning, heat, smoke, spicy
• Forever - eternal, doesn't break

Ideas:

• Write things you don’t like about yourself and throw it into a fire that burns something that can't be melted by fire (e.g. titanium) = shows person that no matter what people say about them they won't break

I then went to the induction for 78-207 in the afternoon. It was very interesting and I’m super excited to begin working on our project in week 4.

Friday

On Friday I sat down to begin my brainstorming to come up with an idea for presentations next week. I began just writing down anything that came to mind, reminding myself that no idea was a bad idea. I found this somewhat challenging as I was very overwhelmed by the scope of possibilities. I kept thinking back to the classic pot plant that responds to how its being taken care of to help the owner keep the plant alive. I began thinking about how I could scale this idea up to help households cut back on their energy use. This is where the idea, Artificial Conscience came about. My initial ideas for this concept included:

Environmental monitor - Energy tracking guy

• Temperature - it’s too hot in here, turn the heater down
• If too many lights are on, says it’s too bright
• If lights are left on all day, gets electrocuted
• If shower was too long, turns blue and “drowns”

Knows weather, season, temperature, light

Have different sensors wirelessly connected

Groot kind of thing

Better self on the shelf:

• People strive to be better, reminder to be good
• best way to change behaviour is disapproval

Work to Do

The work I still have to do is to further strengthen and understand my concept of Artificial Conscience, and create the poster for my presentation next week.

This Week

As the first week of PhysComp comes to a close, a clear introduction was presented to us - addressing concerns, questions, and what to expect during the semester.

I'm very excited for what we can achieve in this course and very much so looking forward to the exhibition towards the end of the semester. I'm looking forward to working with the team to develop a product in which we can all be proud to showcase to the general public, fellow peers.

HCI Grand Challenge

- Challenge 5: Accessibility & Universal Access

[Insert photo]

[Insert Photo]

[Insert Photo]

[Insert Photo]

Reflection

This week was just a taste of ideation which amplified that there are a lot of ideas out there, given the ambiguity, no restriction, judgement free space and the freedom to be as creative as one can be.

Tuesday:

At the beginning of the course, we went through the course learning goals and tasks outline completely. Following that, we had discussed what our expectations are and what kind of fear we have or might be facing.

For me, I am expecting to get the most interaction design process concepts out of the course since it sounds like a big but vague title. And to be honest, I am a little worried about if I can always stay focus when attending courses that had such long hours. Plus I had no previous experience to get both my hardware and software connected. Which will be fine(hopefully haha) as long as I keep working hard on it.

Following that, we discussed and share examples of physical computing projects on Slack. I personally like the previous "MAGIC SKIRT" the most, because it combined educated and entertained experiences nicely for users. The one I picked is called " VR is doing the full-size car"https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185109-inside-fords-virtual-reality-prototyping-lab-why-make-full-size-clay-cars-when-vr-will-do . Simply I found this is fascinating that how the traditional industry(Ford) embraces the advancement of technology.

Wednesday

The first part of Wednesday is to discuss the Seven HCI Grand Challenges, and I was allocated to group 5, where we talked about accessibility and universal access. This topic is highly active engaged not only in other design courses but also in the overall research community, which is decided to ensure the product or services can be used on an equal basis with users who are old or with disabilities.

And then I got my little "Phys Comp" Box!

In the second part of the day, we had fun but challenging project ideation, which using a set of playing cards generate a sentence to encourage fresh ideas by corresponding to a list of words. The first-round is group brainstorming, and second-round is individual ideation. Then we shared the "best of the table " with the whole class.

For me, I got "Empower Desert Fire Forever" as my keyword, and the final generation is super funny: There is a love game in the desert, where the participants need to find the frustrated partner and cheer him/her up by promising they will won’t be apart forever so they are empowered to use fire for heat to survive. And here is the first idea: The high demand in the oil production from the desert empowered the never-ended oil fires. Anyways, I enjoyed it a lot!

This week discussion

In this week's discussion, I was allocated to the group two.The point is to generate interactions that are used in the context of the time but not aggressively, how people interact in the environment of the device's disappearance. The discussion concluded that VR was the most appropriate approach found so far. But that means more interactions, so privacy is a new issue.

In addition, people use interactive technologies, even if they don't need them. Eliminate the user's addiction to interaction. At the same time let them clearly understand the difference between interaction environment and the reality is the future challenge.

Besides, how to make people aware of the interaction with the current environment, for example, for the first time to use the current interaction environment, how to make them aware of the interaction can be done and how to do the interaction.

About Concern

Before finishing the final work, there will be physical construction in the process, which I am curious about and hope to make some progress. There are also expectations in terms of thinking about different interactions, such as the feeling of not being used very often. As a background for interaction design, I'll explore more about the user experience. Hope the process is new and interesting.

About Me

Hi! My name is Jason Yang and I'm studying a Bachelor of Commerce and I.T. Innovation has been a huge passion for me, especially after working for SAP in their Innovation Network Centre team. I am very passionate about innovation, graphic design and collaborating collectively as a team to deliver the best results.

What I Hope to Learn/Achieve in PhysComp

Since this course has been designed for students in their final year, I would love design and showcase at the end of the semester a product in which we can all be proud to show potential employers.

I would love to grow my experience in ideation in particular as this stage is usually the most sophisticated - given various factors.

Furthermore, it is great that this course provides us with an opportunity to build a physical item with no material limitations per se.

I endeavour to achieve a high grade in this course through high work and collectively develop an innovative masterpiece which I am able to proudly showcase in my portfolio at the and of the semester.

Looking forward to a solid semester and working with everyone in the studio! Let's make great happen!

About Me

Hello everyone! my name is Sulaiman MA. I am a postgraduate of ID who is passionate about designing cool stuff relating to music and game. I am a kind of imaginative person，which also makes me a good idea producer when brainstorming. I hope to have a good time and see some really cool stuff this semester. Good luck everyone!😊

Expectations

As a 4 units course, I thought we will learn more things from this course, Such as Programming technology relating to Arduino, some basic knowledge to use a basic machine to produce some medium-quality products. After attaining the UQ Innovate Induction, I feel stressed about the process of practicing my design， because of so many machines and so many rules to memorize. Hope that the tutor can give us some help when we do the production of our design.

Finally, hope everybody can have a good time, and get an ideal final outcome!💪

The challenges in HCI

Because of the coronavirus, I had to choose to return to Australia after 14 days of self-isolation in Thailand. Due to the unfamiliarity with the network environment, in the past week, I had a hard time keeping up with the progress of the class, because my Internet speed was not enough to support me to update the screen on zoom in real time. So in this reflection, I just want to talk about my own views on the 7 challenges.

It can be said that the past decade is the most breakthrough and innovative decade in human history: the maturity of smart phones, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, cloud computing, gene editing, and the commercialization of genomics. Overall, these new developments have led us to reconsider the challenges facing modern design.

For me: I think one of the most important challenges is learning and creativity. Creativity and learning are two closely related concepts that form the concept of creative learning and should be pursued within the scope of current and future education curricula. And I think creativity is the foundation of all design. Finally, new technologies have the potential to support emerging learning styles, which have recently evolved and are universally influenced by the technology of everyday life in the new generation. Personalization of future learning will be very important. So I think creating and learning is the most important challenge.Also, Changes and innovations in educational methods can really provide great convenience to people and thus improve their work and learning efficiency. For example, the distance learning method that we use now, it still has a lot of imperfections, and it can't be compared with the face-to-face traditional education method, just as we are now. So, I think education is the most important thing, and that's why I think Learning & Creativity is the most important thing.

Hello everyone, my name is Jiexiang. This is the last semester of my studies at UQ. I am doing the master of interaction design. As far as my professional background is concerned, I am good at some researches related to users, such as research methods and evaluation. In the course of the previous year and a half, I also master some basic front-end programming skills, such as HTML and CSS.

But I found that I still have a lot of skills that need me to cultivate, such as back-end programming and the ability to express my opinion. I hope that through this course, these capabilities can be further improved. In addition, I am also very interested in the composition of some manual tasks and physical components, because my own ideas can be turned into reality through my own efforts, which will help improve my professional self-confidence.

About Me

My name is Jaskaran Sehmbey and I am a personable and enthusiastic 3rd-year student who is a quick learner and a progressive thinker. I enjoy interacting with others with a positive approach. I am a solid team player and a good individual contributor as well.

I am currently studying Bachelors of Information Technology and pursuing my major in Software Design. I have many interests where I want to work in the future like game designing, Mobile App development, and web-designing.

Expectations

This being my last semester, I hope to build something innovative or something that helps others. I would love to work upon a project where I get to use the tools & equipment in the UQ Innovate area. Lastly, I hope to work hard and achieve good grades by the end of this semester (but who doesn't :p).

Concept: SMASH IT - Relieving stress without making a mess, allowing you to smash, hit or break objects without making a mess!

What:

Allowing humans to relieve stress, anger, frustration that can come from a work environment, school/university or family situation. Using a non-destructive way allows people to smash, hit, bang, squash physical objects with force. This is then captured and displayed on a screen.

How:

Using everyday home objects, people can destroy them and this can relieve the stress or angry feelings. Some people enjoy breaking things and this is a perfect way to do so without making a mess and doing it safely.

The objects will be made of a malleable, sturdy foam that can pass the force through without actually destroying the object. There will be conductive sensors that can pick up the force and then translate this onto the screen. The screen will be gameified and the more an action is done the more red blocks will appear. It will be level-based.

Purpose:

• For stressed, angry individuals who want an alternate way of relieving their stress
• Non- destructive
• Playful and gamification
• Can be done in the home or in public (depends which is more entertaining)
• Visualisation of the stress or anger
• Can result in a happier state of mind
• Safe Environment

Concept Sketch:

Inspiration:

I drew my inspiration from a few different sources. They can be found in the image below along with the links as well. After some ideation and mind mapping of different things I could create a concept on I settled on the idea of human wellbeing and happiness. Using technology in a playful way to improve human happiness can be important in this day and age as it's all around us. And a message I took away from the HCI exercise - Human-Centered Symbiosis. Technology has to be integrated seamlessly into our lives to improve it. If it's not working for us in a purposeful way then why have it. It has to be beneficial and what better way to do that with happiness and ensuring we all have a good mental state.

Smash Splash - https://www.smashsplash.com.au/

Rage Room - https://www.ragecagesmashroom.com.au/about/

Stress Relief - https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/16-ways-relieve-stress-anxiety#section12

Stress Relief Products - https://www.bestproducts.com/lifestyle/g3219/stress-relief-relaxation-products/

About me

Hello everyone, I am in my second last semester of Master of Interaction Design program. I have learned the nature of design and some basic programming skills in my previous year. I hope that I can develop further understanding of physical computing and enjoy the design process.

About the course

For this course, I am interested in developing new skills which I haven't experienced before like laser cutting and woodworking. I am looking forward to using the tools to propose and present playful, creative and engaging interactive technology project for everyday life that go beyond traditional forms of interaction. I have visited the interaction design exhibit last year and met many engaging works there. I’ll try my best working as a team to finish the project like them at the end of the semester.

This week

This week we were introduced to the course with assessment items, learning outcomes and more. I attended the UQ Innovate induction, which was very useful. In addition to this, I completed all the required online tutorials pior to the session. I understand that these provide important information regarding safety in the makerspace. Day 2 we spent ideating and discussing the challenges, which was very interesting.

I had the challenge of ethics, security and privacy which is highly relevant for any technology (and most aspects in life, really). We found the challenge to be about the different concerns around the topics, specifically regarding IoT, Online Social Networks, Big data, Healthcare Technology, VR, intelligent environments and Cybersecurity. An example of this could be the different ethical considerations and concerns that comes with new technology such as smart homes. I found it very interesting that healthcare technology is considered its own category here, as it covers a broad specter of different technologies. We found that government regulations had not been coverend in the paper, which we feel like is a very relevant topic. We also discussed how there should in general be a bigger privacy focus and how you can actually design FOR privacy, instead of considering it afterwards. An example of this is installing cameras to monitor a person with alzheimers. This can feel uncomfortable for friends and family visiting, and rather one could design for privacy by thinking of what the monitoring is needed for, and for example design a wearable device like a watch instead.

For the ideation section we used Awais method of different sets of card with different factors. I really enjoyed this method as it forced us to think of very specific scenarios that we would not have thought of otherwise. It was similar to a method he has indroduced me to before, the twist cards. One thing I found to be slightly cumbersome/confusing in the task was step 3: We were supposed to select an idea that we liked and build further on this. The process of selecting an idea was a bit difficult as we yet didn't know everyone's ideas. The solution was that everyone quickly read their ideas from the silent round out loud, but I did not think this was sufficient enough to put our minds in the ideas. The method was really useful to spike our creativity, but just this step could use a little more work, e.g. develop a method for how to present the individual ideas.

For the idea generation for next week's assessment I chose to come up with specific interaction scenarios and think of different ideas for each. In addition, I tried to break down each word of the assessment description so understand what the task was asking for. I discussed this with a tutor to get some clarity, which was really helpful. My breakdown is in one of the photos below.

Surviving the first day of uni after the long break is always the hardest. As usual, we have discussed about each others expectations, rumours we’ve heard and concerns of this course. I felt quite relieved that most of the people were worried about the heavy workload as I did.

Examples on Slack

After the sharing, we gained some ideas from the examples on slack. I personally felt inspired by the ‘Water Droplet’, since water in our stereotype is liquid form which is hard to control and have little connection with technology, and the design broke my traditional view of water. The designers made water as a medium to communicate with people, which can be used daily and can be interactive with people. This gave me an idea of how materials can be used to interactive with people and the novel technology it has, which is highly possible to integrated to the future work.

7 HCI Grand Challenges

I was assigned to the ‘Accessibility and Universal Access’ section. After discussing within the group, we came up with several challenges to pursue the goal:

• The high cost of achieving the goal, maybe because of the location of implementing or the material using.
• Different age group have different background, thus, they have their own habit of using the products.
• My grandma cannot accept smart phones but the old ones with keyboard
• Learning ability differs between age, people and interests, thus, it is hard for everyone to use the same technology.
• People have different motivations to use a wide range of products based on their interests, financial status and other concerns.
• The development of different regions. There are some areas where technology is not as advanced as the others so that the people in the area may not be able to access certain products.
• Description: Everyone no matter their demographic and location have access to the products or services.

Consideration:

• Design technology that is for general use instead of specific purpose
• The exercise encouraged me to think of products that have high accessibility:
• Wifi: highly ubiquitous however there are regions such as areas in the mountain have difficulties access it.
• Mobile phone: for contacting purpose, most of the people in the world have a phone but not necessarily smart phone.

* It is difficult to think of an example or a product that has universal access human-computer interaction, since that there are still some areas that don't have the technology to achieve it.

• The readings gave me aspects of the challenges the technologies are facing, which inspires me to think of an idea that can overcome the problem.

Ideation - Card

Design to Reinvent a restaurant using shrink permanently

Shrink represented the following:

• Small
• No water
• Tiny

Context can be:

• Cutlery
• Space in restaurant
• Size of food
1. The size of the restaurant and food shrink by year for people suffering from obesity
• Challenge for people
• Less waste of takeaway box, plastic bags
2. The size of the restaurant expands so that the people in it feels shrinking every time they visit
• Beneficial for people that are not confident in their body shape
3. The restaurant has high rate of evaporation so that the amount of water shrinks
• Makes you feel dry so that you drink more water
4. The cutleries shrink and eventually the age of customer segment becomes younger
• Perfect size for child
5. The restaurant shrinks the foods for the people who have leftovers in their last visit
• For eco friendly and reducing food waste
6. As the budget for hiring people becomes expensive, the restaurant shrinks the number of staffs which causing a long waiting time for the food and services
• I think it is fairly interested to see the word 'shrink' in two different aspect: restaurant shrinking and people feels shrinking as the size of the restaurant expand.
• It is also excited to see of how the ideas connected to different aspects such as due to the size of restaurant and cutleries shrinks, the age group becomes younger. The idea has correlation between age and shrink.
• The exercise prompts our idea from a weird situation, but it is easier to generate ideas.

Hi! my name is Jen and I'm in my third year of pursuing a Bachelor of Information Technology, majoring in information systems.

I am excited to get starting with this course and be working together in teams to build something fun. I am hoping to learn more about teamwork process and how to solve problems efficiently in stressful situations. Besides that, I am looking forward to engaging with more physical materials through construction or electronics.

In this course especially, I am concerned that I do not have enough skill to contribute to my team in the area of creativity and ideation. However, having these first four weeks to dive into creative thinking would hopefully be a gateway to ease myself into being more design-oriented.