World Café

This week is my first week back to campus, and I hope everything goes well for this semester.

There was a “World Café” in this week's class. Students' ideas were divided into 17 categories: Beautify the Self, Change through discomfort, Altered Landscapes, Enhanced mundane spaces, Everyday sustainability, Musical things, Emotional totems, Musical metrics, Emotional intelligence, Sassy tech, Guided movement, Bothersome tech, Change through positive reinforcement, Digital sensations, Creative Learning, Body as a controller, Ability-centric interactions.

In a randomly allocated group discussion, we had a deeper discussion of different ideas from the same classification.

In this activity, I found a lot of interesting ideas. However, these ideas may not be perfect in the current stage and need further optimization. An idea that impressed me throughout the discussion came from “beautify the self”. To put it simply, the meaning of this idea is to use a wearable device to detect a person's mood and health status and visualize the user's health status in the form of a tree to help users pay attention to their physical health status. When the user's physical condition is in good condition, the growth state of the tree shows a good trend, otherwise, the health trend of the tree will show a downward trend.

First of all, I think this idea is very good. Visualizing things that are difficult for people to perceive will better attract people's attention. However, the downside of this idea is that it may have a negative psychological impact on some users. For example, some users who are not in good physical condition or who have psychological problems, if their tree growth status has been showing a downward trend, will this bring them bad psychological cues and cause a vicious circle?

The discussion of this idea led me to discover that every idea may not be perfect, because everyone's thinking has certain limitations. Therefore, discussion and research with different people can better avoid this situation. And can make their own design can be adapted to more users.

In the final group selection, I chose music-related topics, because I think that music can be engaging and give users a better interactive experience. At the same time, I have more information on this topic.

Workshop Induction

I think this course is very necessary. In the group creation later this semester, we are likely to involve making our own installations. This course mainly introduces the use of different machines and facilities.