I've spent an excessive amount of time running in circles around the ideas I had the other day, and so it's time to break them down and see what did and didn't work.

While it was a great opportunity to speculate and wonder about these ideas where I thought "Hey, wouldnt it be cool if this was a thing!!!"... I was supposed to be working on a concept and not concepts. In hindsight, none of these were good ideas, they need to at least be passable, and I should have been more focused on the brief when thinking about them.

For now, the pros and cons of each individual concept.

1. Angry Kitchen Tools

Pros:

• short, quick interactions - wont overstay their outcomes
• movements are straightforward
• grabbing, pressure, angle and repetitious actions can all be measured using rudimentary sensors

Cons:

• Has to differentiate from other, existing smart tools
• Sensor calibration shenanigans (I know were avoiding implementation specifics, but it's still worth considering)

2. A Cog for the Machine

Pros:

• Understanding how people rationalise and accept technology
• Getting people woke to the idea of job scarcity and underemployment
• strong, negative emotions, a chance to start up interesting conversations

Cons:

• being locked in a room is anxiety inducing, which is intended, but perhaps such an idea does more harm than good
• answering questions is boring - the structure of the questions matter just as much as who is asking hem
• the research into
• arm wrestling a robot isn't a substantial interaction
• putting people in an unwinnable situation inherently biases them against tech
• not an interaction that can be returned to... only novel the first time
• Too many what ifs

3. Reflecting Fountain

Pros:

• ??? This one was a bit too half baked

Cons:

• Interaction is a little brief
• Posture correction is much more... passive than something like watching an ad. It's not an interaction if they just have to stretch out.

4. Panopticon Go-Karts

Pros:

• understanding the impact of social robots that have no empathetic characteristics on peoples perception of machines
• it'd be funny

Cons:

• literally not an interaction
• eye contact and gaze detection is notoriously hard to handle, need lots of cameras
• way too passive, people forced to interact with these machines

5. Life Switchboard

Pros:

• Perform a straightforward action to get a result
• Somewhat unusual mode of interaction
• Meeting new people creates a social space, what kind of ground rules would people set up?

Cons:

• Movements in the interaction are too small and inconspicous, its more of a situation than an interaction
• Too much room for abuse

Closing Thoughts

These were really basic risk benefit assessments - but there's a clear throughline with the problems with them, I've focused a little too much on the concepts and what ifs, and not enough on how people fit into the situation.

Typically, I'm used to researching for specific users first, and then narrowing down into an idea from there, so the opportunity to simply design in any space may have gone less well than expected.

With that being said, the idea with the most tangible interaction for now is angry kitchen tools... which unfortunately is the idea I'm least interested in.

Understanding the reality that most ideas are going to be thrown out and transformed later on... perhaps there's some value in just having something presentable through a more refined version of that idea, rather than having a concept I enjoy be the first foot forward, particularly with how abstract most of them are.