Tuesday

Today we discussed our fears, hopes and expectations on the course. Some of my fears were that I would suffer from my lack of programming skills and that I might struggle to come up with good ideas. I am also concerned about the long hours as well as the stresses that come with working together in a team.

However, I hope to improve my programming skills throughout this course as well as work well together in teams to produce innovative and unique interactions through our projects. Additionally, I hope for the support and collaboration of my coursemates for the coming semester.

In looking for inspiration, I found I was drawn to projects found on the Hardware UX/UI Instagram account such as the modern piggy bank whose emotional wellbeing is solely dependent on how much money you feed it, and the Abanico clock that redesignes the way we interact with a bedside alarm clock in such a creative way.

I hope to be able to one day design cutting-edge technology that is both affordable to the average consumer but still effective and impactful enough to change the way they interact with their daily lives after incorporating such products into their lives.

Wednesday

My section of the HCI Grand Challenges were on wellbeing, health and eudaimonia.

During project ideation, we used playing cards with each suit having its own property that reflected each of the 13 values. For each design round, a sentence is made from the 4 properties by each team.

With the individual rounds, we were allowed to swap between the other suits of cards on the table.

I started with the following sentence, but then swapped cards to get the next sentence as I could no come up with an idea. The ideas I came up with are in the bullet points following each sentence.

Design for creating in a lounge room to shout using the quality of personal

Design for confronting in a lounge room to shout using the quality of personal

• A safe space with an interactive wall display that confronts you so you shout and release your problems

• A sound proof private relaxing room for resolving arguments

Design for confronting in childhood to look using the quality of personal

• A tv show that exposes childhood myths -santa, tooth fairy, but they cannot tell anyone

Design for confronting in the apocalypse to look using the quality of ambiguous

• Art installation that flicks between normal and zombie when someone isnt looking

Design for confronting in the apocalypse to point using the quality of ambiguous

• A watch that tracks when the user points at something and produces either an interesting relevant fact or shocks the wearer if no fact is found

Design for capturing in the apocalypse to point using the quality of ambiguous

• A game where the user captures zombies to free humanity by pointing and them but some are humans in disguise to survive the zombies

Design for creating in the apocalypse to point using the quality of ambiguous

• A build your zombie game where you get features by pointing at another zombie but being unable to choose which feature is taken

The final round had us choosing an idea from the initial team round and expanding it. We chose misdirectional sound, changing it to have users follow a prerecorded description of art pieces to find it, then being able to record their description for the next person to find.

While we had a rough idea of how we would run the tests, we still have a long way to go before the final idea is fully developed.