Work Done

This week our team mainly just focused on the report. I did find this report quite challenging to write as I had been putting off making any concrete decisions about my focus and form etc. However, I'm really glad I have done this as my direction is a lot more clear now and I am excited to continue researching to flesh out the final details.

On Wednesday we went through conducting user testing externally. I found this task quite difficult initially as I felt weird doing an observation through YouTube but I was really surprised at how much detail you can get in just watching videos others have posted. I was aware that the videos posted would be the extremes in people's behaviour but it was a good start. Before this studio, I was a bit concerned about how I was going to conduct the user testing, and was really limiting myself to just using my family or using zoom to interview my family and friends. However, after reading through the google doc outlining all the other methods we could use, I feel a lot more confident in user testing for my project.

As a team, we then completed a live brainstorming session to outline all the smaller details around our concept to ensure we all understood and had a say in the direction of our concept.

On Thursday, we had the Arduino tutorial. This was actually super fun and I found the activities really interesting.

I feel a lot more confident working with the Arduino and found the light sensor activity particularly useful. I can definitely alter this for my project and think I could get this sensor for my prototype completed in the next few weeks.

Work to do

Over the mid-semester break I want to continue playing around with the Arduino and maybe even try to get the light sensor to have some different outputs that I could use for my prototype. I also bought more silicone (ensuring it was 100% silicone this time…) so I want to have another go with Protoputty so I can finalise what materials I will use to build the prototype.

Related Work

I spent some time this week looking through the literature and read in a paper that parents are more likely to minimise their energy consumption if it is seen as a learning opportunity for their children! I initially just picked my user group as families with school-aged children as I thought it would be interesting to explore the form and interactions in a playful way, as well as being a teaching moment for children so they are more energy conscious when they are older. However, I didn't realise it would have this added benefit of motivating the parents too, which was great to find.

Paper: M. Fell and L. F. Chiu, “Children, parents and home energy use: Exploring motivations and limits to energy demand reduction,” Energy Policy, vol. 65, pp. 351-358, 2014.