Contact & Workshop

In this week, we participated in the contact and workshop session we are allocated to.

During Tuesday’s contact session, Lorna first went through some options about how can we move our projects to the next level. After that, we conducted the ‘report back’ activity in our contact session in terms of our feedback on online format, team/individual progress after peer critiques, our plans and concerns. By reporting back and receiving feedback, we got a clearer understanding about our domain, and what help and resources we can get from teaching team, which will be really helpful for us. After the coffee break, our team organised team zoom meeting session to further discuss the plan, concepts and also invited Ben to give us further suggestions. By talking with Ben, he gave us some ideas around how can we work under the same problem space but explore different directions, like targeting at different user groups, focusing on different contexts of use, putting concept into different scenarios, etc. That enabled us to become clearer about working in the team manner but focusing on individual part.

During Friday’s workshop session, Clay and Alison first guided us to do a small ‘stand-up’ session, where we talked about what’s the potential problem space of our team and what’s the progress so far. After that, in order to give us some specific suggestions on refining each team’s problem space and moving forward our project, each team was allocated to different breakout rooms, so we were able to have the opportunity to refine our concept further and get feedback on that. By discussing with each other, the specific problem we decided to design for is ‘Breathing for a better life’. Under this team umbrella, we will explore different user groups/contexts in each one’s possible solution. This research direction also got the approval from Clay and Alison, and they shared some articles and apps around this space for us to refer to, which was very helpful for us.

Team progress

In this weekend, our team had some team chat with teaching team via Zoom and several online meetings for our team members. By discussing with teaching staffs, we got some valuable feedback and had a clearer understanding about what we are supposed to do next. In addition, we also got some clarifications around our team’s and individual’s concerns for moving forward. Combining the feedback and suggestion given by the teaching team and critiques received in previous pitch session, and in order to align with the course project domain, our team decided to move our focus from simple gesture-controlled games to a more meaningful day-to-day environment and object. Therefore, we decided to put this interesting domain, ‘Body as controller’, into a daily context, ‘breathing’.

Many people think that breathing is a simple and common thing, but they don’t realise that it is beneficial to people's physical and mental health, and the way of breathing is required in different situations, such as exercise, stress relieving and singing, also varies. So, our team is going to design some engaging and novel ways of interaction to help people learn and practice different breathing patterns to meet their different needs. That means our team can work in the same design space, but explore different contexts, or user groups.

we decided to move our focus from only ‘hand gestures’ to different parts of our bodies; to go beyond only focusing on game space; to put our concept into a more day-to-day environment; to explore how to apply this technology into various contexts, to reduce the reliance of system on the screen, etc.

For our team’s specific plan for the upcoming week, we decided to first keep searching for some research materials, like journal articles, papers, existing solutions, to get a deeper understanding of our team problem space as well as each one’s specific design context. In this step, in order to keep our team can keep efficient communications, we can create team Miro Mind map board, so that we can share our inspirations, progresses, etc. Besides, we’ll keep writing each one’s individual part of the team proposal.

Individual progress

In this week, it was mainly about negotiating the group and individual aspects around the course project. We also refined our concepts in preparation for proposal report. Since our team have decided our final problem space, in this week, I focused more on exploring a particular user group and context of this space. Basically, I’d like to focus on teaching those who are interested in singing how to master the belly breathing method of singing through some interesting and interactive exercises. So, I searched some explanation videos and articles of this breathing method online to get a thorough understanding of that. In addition, I took a look at some existing apps around helping people learn breathing, which was also helpful to enable me to further explore in this context.

Apart from that, I finished the assigned team part of the proposal report, and in the next step, I will try to finish my individual part as soon as possible, so that we can quicker move to next level of this whole project.

Reference

Images retrieved from 'Walking up' and 'Guided meditation' apps

Improvement

Compressing the image file size for better display in journal post.
Adding the alt text description of each image