Tuesday - Contact

On Tuesday we started off with a 'stand-up' where each person in all teams was to explain what the team and they themselves had done so far in the course. Although interesting to listen to what the other teams are doing there was a lot of overlap and repetition from many team members. So far in the process, most of what we have done is as a team and therefore there is little extra to tell when asking a second team member. I believe we would hear more unique aspects moving forwards as we are moving into the individual parts of the course. However, I'm also concerned about the amount of time this takes up and if it's worth the time as I didn't feel like I learned anything from this exercise.

After the stand-up, we jumped into team chats to work on our concept. In this meeting, we talked about starting to write the report and work out how we could split the concept between ourselves. We decided that we wanted to split prototypes based on outputs and inputs. Given that Thomas and I live in the same house we decided that we could take one input and one output so that we are able to test if everything works as it is supposed to locally before testing remote. Moreover, Tuva was to prototype automatic input and Marie were to prototype an output. However, at this point, it was still unclear what the individual prototypes should be.

At this point, Ben came in to give us some feedback on our concept. He brought up some good points on how manual input could be an extra barrier of entry. We also discussed how we should consider the physical aspect of the concept such as what the balls are doing and how they could be interacted with. Ben also gave us some technical suggestions to look into such as ESP32s or ESP8266s for the connectivity and Galvanic Skin Response(GSR) as a sensor in case we wanted to measure emotions as users were holding the ball in their hands. Finally, we asked for some tips and tricks too for user interviews.

After our feedback from Ben, we went on to create an interview protocol to get some early information on how people understand emotions, how they display them as well as if and when they are comfortable sharing emotions. We decided to write some open-ended questions to begin the interview with, continue with a task to allow users to show us how they think and then end with some more directed questions.