Contact & tutorial

In this week's contact and tutorial sessions, we had a deep discussion with our teaching team. Basically, we reported back our working progress and ask some questions about the whole project and proposal, and got useful feedback and clarification which help us to divide our individual work and to decide team cooperate mode.

About Zoom

After a week's experience with using Zoom, I'm totally getting used to this online tool, without any network issues, the communication with other team members and teaching team is clear and fluent. I'm just a little worried about, when it comes to practical tutorials like Arduino, how it will deliver the content, we will see in the next week.

Team progress

This week, our team had two meetings to discuss our proposal progress and individual work. As for the proposal's team section, we divided our work like this:

The Team Domain (Concept/Context/Problem Space) (Shane & Tianyi)
Response to Feedback (Dennis)
Related Work (All 3 of us focus on 3 aspects: exercise promotion, music's connection with exercise, music's effect on human emotions)
Audience & Intended Experience （Shane）
Relevance to Theme (Tianyi)

As for individual sections, I will focus on using multiple sensors to capture pressure data as input, Tianyi will work on translating pressure data into music rhythm, Shane will take care of sounds & light interactions as output. In the proposal, each of us will discover our direction under the team domain.

Individual work

This week, I reviewed the feedback from last week's presentation and got some new inspirations below:

Some classmates mentioned that our design could work for both ways, as in the music adjusting to your actions or, you have to exercise according to how the music and lights change. This was discussed previously in our group meeting, at that time, we have not decided to use which mode or involve them together, now the feedback shows some of our audience like to have both. We will do more user research and user test lately to investigate users’ preference.
Customizable. A further extension of previous point, a lot of classmates commented that it would be better to let users decide the interactions in multiple ways, like exercise modes, music types, volume control etc. Our team discussed this and agreed that provide options for users could make our device more playful and adaptive to different user groups. Our next step will research on users’ preferences, we will set up some questions to find out what options are suitable for them while they are interacting with our installation.
Health status. Fitness and exercise are connected with human’s healthcare. Some feedbacks are about heart rate detection to provide health status while they are doing exercise and prevent from exhausting. Heartbeat could also be a data input that connect with physical interactions like light and vibration. Our team agrees that these feedbacks are inspiring and for practical concern, we could involve fitness band to capture heart rate data. Also, these feedbacks helped us to reflect on our domain and provide us a potential direction to discover in our individual research.
Motivation. Link back to our original design purpose, one is to motivate people to do more exercise through playful interactions. Our tutor challenged us about how to use our approach to help motivate people who either have no knowledge of how to exercise or have no motivation to exercise. After group discussion, we thought about two options to answer this question, one is to provide a tutorial at the beginning to let users who have no knowledge of how to exercise to be familiar with our device. The other is to introduce goals, achievement, challenges among friends to motivate users to make some changes. Our team will do further research on this area in the following sections.
Music type, some colleagues mentioned about what music people want to listen to while working out and if any particular type of music fits better for specific types of exercise. This requires us to do more literature review to see how music affects people’s emotion, music type could also connect to exercise mode, for example, use pop music when users have the intensive exercise and pure music when users just finish their training and relax.
Promotion, some colleagues suggest that the promotion of exercise can be improved, for example, if everyone is working out correctly, a melody is maintained. If one person is falling behind – music starts to play out of time (causing frustration and motivation to keep up to pace). Fitness promotion is our next step of discovering our domain, one of our members is currently working on this aspect.
Music haters, some mentioned that what if there are people who do not like to listen to music or if it is using speakers to play music, it could be annoying in public places. Well, our design could not cover every people and satisfy them, so, when we design this, we have a specific user group and use case, to limit it in household fitness. However, we can still involve some adjustments like using wireless headphones to replace speakers, so they won't bother other people.
Multiple users & interactions. One of our classmates suggested that it could be interesting to think about how multiple people could interact with the concept using different equipment and how that would change the music. Our team agreed that this will make our installation more playful and involve more users to interact with our product. Having different exercise equipment is one of our considerations. We can try to deploy the same algorithm and data detection across multiple fitness equipment.

Making and using an Arduino pressure sensor

As pressure sensor is a vital component in our design, I've searched for some tutorials about how to use this sensor.