Given Appraisals

This week the team worked together to critique and write appraisals for three other teams. We set about watching the videos together and having a quick debrief before adding our own general thoughts and insights in a collective team excel spreadsheet. This allowed all team member's opinions and critiques to be succinctly documented so, when writing the formal appraisal, all insights could be drawn upon. The team split the writing responsibilities equally and then made sure all appraisals were edited before posting to Miro

Received Appraisals

I received appraisals from three teams: Team X, The Negative Nancies and Half Ice No Sugar. I was given insightful feedback from all teams and, as expected, most of the critiquing elements releated to my individual concept's audio feedback component.

Contextualising colour for the colour blind is proving to be a lot more difficult than originally anticipated. I am yet to come across a form of audio feedback that has a purely objective link to colour that all user's are unanimously happy with. People with perfect colour perception debate the actuality of certain colours so I am not quite sure how I am meant to translate this rocky context of colour into audio feedback for colour blind and visually impaired users. Syneasthesia did stand as a theoretically justified link from colour to audio, however, this did not translate well to the team's evaluating my conceptual design. Granted, the concept did rely on near perfect-pitch to be able to form the cognitive ties between sound and colour so I do think that I am going to have to ideate for a new form of audio feedback.

One suggestion was that utilising the frequency levels of the colour's light and translating it into a sound frequency could be an apt alternative. I have been doing some preliminary research into this and it looks to be my strongest contendor for a new form of audio feedback.

Another repetitive piece of feedback I receieved was using accumulative audio feedback (ie using chords). I am really reluctant to pursue this approach for two reasons:

1: It relies on actual perfect pitch which a 6-7 year old audience will likely not have

2: It detracts significantly from the colour mixing element (red + yellow != the distinct values of red and yellow). Adding red and yellow results in an entirely new output -> orange. Previously conducted user testing highlighted an expectation to hear to audio output for the given colour (orange) rather than the two notes of red and yellow played in unison. With that being said, while I appreciate the premise of the feedback regarding chords, I am hesitant to integrate it into Mixed as a result of previous user testing.

Going Forward

Going forward I am going to look into how I would go about integrating this frequency based audio. At the moment - if I was to use it raw - it sounds incredibly annoying (think mosiquito in ear), so finding a way to make these frequencies more pleasant to the ear could be beneficial for the feedback component.

I have also got to start translating my small scale buttons into large pressure pads. So, soldering, hot gluing and cable management is back on the agenda for the near future.

Inspiration

Well, I am currently inspired by 'the dress' given the subjectivity of colour theory and how difficult translating perceived colours into audio equivalents is proving to be. So, is it white and gold or black and blue ... and, more relevantly, what would you expect from the audio feedback of this dresss?