In-class activity

In the Tuesday studio, we conducted a regular report-back session. In this week, I take most of my time on the team report and some individual related work, I will have a detailed description of this part in the personal progress part of this journal. My major questions in this phase are more related to technology:

How to complete the sound transaction (transfer the recording in the dropper to the test tube), and how to delete the sound in the dropper.

After the session, we use Miro as the sharing platform to conduct the activities related to Methods for discovery.

I think Miro is a very suitable platform for teamwork. Due to the particularity of the period, we cannot carry out face-to-face group activities to discuss the direction of future work. In the previous time, we have doubts about how to share ideas effectively and timely, but with the help of this platform, our various team members can post their own data points on our own channels in time, and it is also very convenient to integrate ideas.

The activity we took in class is the observation task. This activity helps me in terms of finding a new way to collect various data. The method I chose for the task (conduct the observation on the train) is finding the relevant video on youtube. Hereunder are my findings during this activity.

The second in-class activity is the break down of the progress, this activity helps us got more inspirations and have an in-depth consideration of our group project. The picture below is the procedure of completing this activity, followed by this we have created our own project.

In the Thursday studio, it focused more on the Arduino things. Through this session, I have a general concept of what is Arduino and what ability I need to equipped with in order to use the kit. At this stage, I also have a general understanding of the various parts of Arduino and their selling prices. Through the sharing of tutors, I have a general understanding of the direction of future learning and the budget for completing the project.

Personal Progress

This week we will focus more on writing group reports. Apart from this, our group have also divided everyone's work and have a discussion on how we could work as a team to finish the final product.

I am responsible for the sound capture & record aspect of the sound lab and will be looking at the aspects of visual design, physical interaction, technical involved, playful concerns, user-centered design to complete my part. For my part, I designed an online questionnaire to investigate user needs. Questions are around people's attitude towards DIY music and how they would like to interact with music. Originally I planned to launch a workshop to collect more opinions, but due to the particularity of the current period, I can only use the form of online questionnaires, so the conclusions I may get are somewhat limited. But through this form, I still extracted a lot of useful data points and sorted out a lot of insights for the subsequent improvement of my part.

(The link for the questionnaire: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdqE2l268cdMDaGNhXsWAlsf57Y43RBeRFauACt8yA1Kg/viewform?usp=sf_link)

In this activity, I have received 30 participants and the results of the questionnaire are as follow:

Key Insights gained

• Most people are interested in DIY music, however, most of their music creation only stays on the surface stage(e.g humming some random melodies come into their minds.) A small number of people will be exposed to professional equipment or musical instruments to perform a complete DIY music process. Music creation is relatively unfriendly to non-professionals

Inspiration: In order to facilitate people's music creation, we must find a kind of music that people can touch at any time. (Everyday Sound)

• Musical disharmony will affect users‘ creative passion.

Inspiration: Control the quality of the collected sound. (Possible solution: Install a decibel detector in the radio equipment(the dropper). When the collected sound exceeds the decibel of the noise, it will not be recorded.)

Inspired by 10 top sensors in Arduino, I will be working on deciding what sensor I am going to use in my project.

Future plan

Next week is the Easter break and there are no classes. In order to promote the progress of the project, I decided to use the holiday to do some research on the technology aspect of our project.

• Conduct more background research into the relationship between music and pressure.
• Research on possible techniques involved.

Because I am new to Arduino, for the completion of the final work I have to watch some online tutorials to get some technical support kit.

• Research on recording and radio equipment, Find the right component and buy components that are not provided in the kit.
• Decide on the task flow of the prototype and start prototyping