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One sentence description of concept

A flower shape emotion manager to help people deal with their negative feelings.

Show us what you’ve been working on

I was working on the physical building of the project and combining it with backends since I got a problem with the material. I have ordered the hand-moldable plastic product but there is something wrong with the delivery. Therefore, I talked with Lorna for help. She provided a new way for me about the materials considered using an artificial flower.

I was worried about whether the lights will work well. But as Lorna said it depends a little on where I place the lights. And the color of the fake flower - the light will come through lighter colored petals. In this case, I plan to go to the shopping mall to buy a suitable artificial flower instead. There is no doubt that it will save me a lot of modeling work.

Exhibit in 2 weeks - main priority to make it feel “finished”?

The physical shape of the flower combined with the techniques.

Questions about the annotated portfolio?

Not really have a question about the portfolio. But I haven't built a website for a long time. Definitely need to recall the memory.

Recap This Week

This week I cannot use the zoom to take the studio since there was something wrong with that and I am still working on that, I hope it can be used next week. Also, the zoom is not the only thing not to work well, my slack also had problems, and I couldn't reply or send messages on it. The good news is that Lorna and I figured out a solution to make sure we can still communicate well. We decided to do the report back via email if the slack and the zoom still not work in the next studio.

Report-back

What is one good thing you can say about lockdown?

Cannot go to the campus makes me feel bad but I have to say, during this lockdown period, I do start to have organized days. I want to try to keep doing more and more things, because it's not easy for me to keep doing one thing, whether it's important or not. This time I spend more time with myself, which makes me want to live a more organized life. I also start small to manage myself. Whether it was from eating breakfast every day or exercising every day to making a daily plan for myself, these changes made me realize how much time I had wasted in the past. So during this lockdown, I think the most rewarding thing is to get along well with myself.

Based on feedback to date & what you have left to complete: What are your key priorities?

One of the most parts of my project that I have left is the physical shape building. My teammate and I have already ordered the materials that we are going to use, but it still has not been delivered yet. And I am still working on some coding areas to let my project work better. In this case, my key priorities must be the physical shape handmaking.

What concerns/questions do you have? (doesn't have to be directly project related)

Seriously, it's a really long time to stay at home, I am a little bit concerned about communication with other people. Of course, I talk with my friends and even staff in the shopping mall, but not like on the campus. Less social activities make me feel a little bit nervous about social someday.

In addition, during the completion of the project, I found that using a pressure sensor can hardly make all six petals receive pressure sensing. I'm thinking about turning the squeezable part of LOME onto the stamen so that the location is more concentrated, and there is enough space for the pressure sensor.

Appraisal Process Review

This week we did the team appraisal. Our team critique Team X. I love their concept. They are using the digital carpet to encourage and enhance people to do the exercise. They use lights and music to achieve their goal. The prolonged pressure causing a melody which is different from a short pressure is impressed me, and the prolonged pressure represents stretching. I do love that idea. The way we use to give the appraisal and receive feedbacks through Miro is pretty cool and really efficient.

Feedback Reflection

There are 3 comments for my concept. I conclude the main problems that I need to consider and the reflections.

• Would like to see the judgment of the words/showing "bad words" being detected

Reflection: I am going to figure out the keywords recognition functions with a database in the next step. Plan A is to color the "bad words" in the transcription of the sentence. Plan B is to show the "bad words" only on the screen.

• Positive feedback should be added. / Interactions to adjust users' emotions should be added

Reflection: The color of the petal will change once the expression is done. So I am going to use the Arduino to let the LEDs change between red and green to give positive and negative feedbacks for users. The way to change the petal's color from red to green is to pluck the red petal and express the negative feelings, then put it back. Hoping this process can achieve emotion adjustment.

• Handle more than one user at the same time can be a problem.

Reflection: If users are not talking to each other, there is not a conversation, the LOME will detect the words by the nearest people. For example, we already have set the sensitivity of the sound sensor, which means if the sensitivity is not that high, the LOME will not detect all the words from all the people in the same space. In this case, we are no going to separate the sound resources since we believe it can be an environment monitor and every family member should be count as a team. So if users are having a conversation, the situation is the same actually. No matter who said the "bad words", the LOME will notify them, and the red petal showing can encourage them to supervise each other.

• MIssing a part of the goal of the project.

Reflection: This comment really let me think over my project again. The end goal of our project is helping people relieve stress, manage emotions, and maintain positive family functioning. When I was doing the prototype, it was easy to miss the problem fixing process. Maybe because of the technical difficulties, I turned my attention to how to solve the problem, ignoring the original purpose of the feature. This comment made me realize that every time I made a change, I should reflect on how it fits the purpose I was trying to achieve. Trying to solve the problem from this perspective doesn't get me stuck in a technical problem that may not be completely necessary.

Gap Filling

From the appraisal, the incompletion of the project is ensured. I did some research about ways to release sadness. Traveling in nature, listening to music, eating foods, and so on, plenty of ways to relieve negative emotions. But none of them can be used in the project, except music playing. Playing music is quite plain since it can be achieved by variable mobile devices, like a smartphone, speaker, MP3, MP4, and so on.

Fortunately, I remembered that one of my friends share her campus experience in the U.S. with me that the campus gave them a lot of toys for decompression. They come in a variety of shapes and can be squeezed to release pressure.

I realized that in the original design, LOME's petals were hollow, and LEDs would be installed in the middle. If squeezable was used as an additional function of the petals, the entire project would not be greatly affected while being perfected.

This is what I plan to build.

This week I am trying to use Unity to achieve the speech recognition feature for my prototype since I found that it is too hard to build a new system to collect voice.

Aspect Focus

I decide to do one of the functions of our group project, speech recognition. The expectation of this feature is to detect the negative words that users said and light the petal.

However, in this stage, I only achieve to recognize all the words that users said and transcript it on the screen.

Tecnique Used

I used Unity to build this function, and install the Speech SDK for Unity so I can use the microphone from the laptop to collect voice.

Gap Found

Creating this stage demonstration lets me consider the potential problem that may occur in the individual project. Because there are only three main technical functions in the group project and the way we separate the project is by different functions appear in the whole team concept. However, this may lead to three familiar outcomes due to the same technical functions using. When it comes to this area, I realized that our team project is not completed. There is no solution to the negative emotions that have been detected. I am going to think about this gap in the next week.

Arduino Using in Project

I focus on the area of communication between the LOME and users. The main technique for this function is sound detection. I am going to use the Arduino Kit to achieve this feature. The main concept is to let the LOME detect the "bad words" that the user said inadvertently and change the petal 's color from green to red. Once the amount of red petals is more than 4, the LOME will notify the user to come to talk about the "negative" stuff.

I'm thinking about how to use the LEDs and the sound sensor to achieve this feature.

I did some searching but all of them are using the sound sensor and LEDs to turn lights off and on by clapping. So I am going to check whether there is other ways to collect voice and recognize the speech.

Reference: https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Sound-Sensor-with-LED/

Individual Responsibility

Based on the new design concept and the limited number of team members, I mainly focused on the appearance design of products, which included product materials and product appearance. This is directly related to the shape of the final outcome of our project. In my current explorations, we may use plastic or resin for making petals, magnets, and iron to make petals detachable to the blossom, and hollow plastic tubes for making flower rods, while leaves can be applied to plastic with a similar texture to petals, or softer cotton cloth can be used.

I hope to find the best materials that can well show the design concept and inner technical part of our team. For example, the petals will have different colors, so the material of the petals must be transparent. From this week's studio, Lorna gave me advice about using Hand-Moldable Plastic products can achieve our needs.

e.g.

Moreover, the petals are detachable, so the user needs to have a moderate suction of the magnet, to enable the user to smoothly and effortlessly pick the petals, but also to make the unpicked petals on the stamen of the stable suction.

In order for the flower to wiggle, the stem material needs to be able to support the flower firmly and bend. My current idea is to use many truncated hard plastic tubes in series, but the final solution still needs to be determined by experimental comparison.

Ideal Finished Product

If I had all the resources and skills that I need, I have the confidence to let the appearance of the LOME reach the original idea that we had maybe even more refined since it will be 3D and more detailed than the sketch.

References

Amazon.com.au : Materialix. Amazon.com.au. Retrieved 24 April 2020, from https://www.amazon.com.au/s?k=Materialix&ref=bldpsweb0.

Concept Discussion

Based on the feedback analysis from last week, we discussed how to improve our group design.

We add one more bud to provide users opportunities to have more interactions with our product, LOME.

Physical Interactions

In our new design concept, users will be able to have more Physical Interactions with the flower and the bud.

Once the user considers complaining about their working time or studying life to the flower, they need to pull out a red petal and put the petal on the one-leaf bud. In this case, the red pulled out petal will change to green which means your negative mood is reborn through the bud. When the user finishes negative emotion sharing, they can pull out the color changed petal from bud and put it back to the flower.

In the process of expressing negative emotions, LOME will use funny ways to help users switch emotions.

Motivate Users to Learn Emotion Management

In the new concept, We want the flowers to simply greet family members each day when they come home from work or school, and each person's response determines the status of the flowers. When mom came home before, for example, LOME will ask the mother "how are you doing today", if the mother gave a positive response, such as good, all the petals are green. When dad came home flowers of color can let dad know this moment the emotional state in the home, while LOME still will ask dad how is him today, and dad's answer to remove all the positive answers will make flowers and even appear red and green. And the color state of the flower seen by the members of the family at the moment is the emotional state of the latest member to return home. If the family member's mood is not good, which means half of the petals are green and half of them are red, so that family member can vent the negative emotions with the LOME.

Expression

When users returned home, in addition to LOME status will be updated according to the members of the emotional color, LOME mainly only detecting the negative emotions in the home, such as complaining about the use of words or dirty words, ten negative words will change one green petal to red, and the mood at the user failed to take the initiative to interact with flowers to vent conditions can make the petals of red color, when most of the petals are red, LOME will take the initiative to issue inquiry "look you now the mood is not very good, want to chat with me?" Such an invitation can make users aware of their negative emotions, and encourage them to express them actively, so as to realize the management of their own emotions.

Challenging the first week to have the studio online, especially had presentations and critiques, but it actually worked! Using WatchTogether makes the PowerPoint clearer to watch and most of the presentations easy to follow but I have to say I prefer to have a discussion face to face rather than online.

Most of the teams worked well and had interesting ideas/concepts and all of us still have some space to work on with.

Critique Reflection

Our team received 38 comments to help us improve our idea.

We organized them all and sorted them into several aspects below.

Physical Interactions

There were several comments point that our design is "too smart" to have physical interactions.

Motivate Users to Learn Emotion Management

Our design should let users learn to express themselves in a healthy way. We should design a function for users to actively express their dissatisfaction and learn to manage their emotions while being aware of their own emotions. Variations Reactions to Different Emotions and Words are needed.

Expression

We should not prevent users from expressing their emotions, and we should respect the way people express their emotions. Encourage them to vent their bad feelings instead of hiding them.

Reflection

Our original design is based on speech detection. All the technologies are around the sound sensor which provides less physical interactions between users and our design.

In this case, we discussed making some changes. We discussed focusing on adding more physical interactions to provide users opportunities to interact with the flower rather than only let the flower detect what it heard. And this justification may prompt users to express themselves while being aware of their own emotions. Users are less likely to passively accept detection and judge their emotions, and more likely to actively and correctly express their emotions.

Moreover, Change the original state of death of the flower, and make the user realize that there may be a problem in the way of emotional expression at the moment in a better way, so as not to make the already negative emotions of the user more negative.

Four girls in our group and one of us is in IT major, others are all in Interaction design. We are working on the theme Emotion Totems. We had a little chat and then started with our team agreement. Everything went well.

Then we started to do a site map through the three ground of World Cafe materials left. And send works to everyone. Each of us needs to come up with one idea based on this site map with some research support as the inspiration.

Ideation

Based on the site map, I chose

• Transfer emotion from negative to positive.
• Share emotions

these two insights to come up with an idea. I am trying to use the lights' colors of the flower's petals to encourage people themselves to recall the good mood that they had to transfer their negative mood to be positive.

Research

People are easily getting stuck in a negative mood and hard to get out. We only can try hard to do with it. Even in a whole day, there was something great happened, as long as one thing doesn't happen your way, people will only remember this “bad” thing and keep complaining. One of the methods to help people get out of this situation can be someone else leads you to recall what happened is good. In the video, Alison Ledgerwood’s husband leads her focus on the good things happened just by asking her what happened is good today after her complaining. Helping Alison recall the positive emotion she had let her realize that that is actually a good day[1].

And people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred which means positive expression can bring more positive emotional expression and negative expressions can bring more negative emotions.[2] In this case, the idea is to use the flower to encourage people to share their positive experiences with a positive mood.

Reference

[1]A. Ledgerwood, "Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck)", Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck), 2013. [Online]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XFLTDQ4JMk&list=LLmpCwEucudTdeD4EsOO2Jzg&index=3&t=0s. [Accessed: 13- Mar- 2020].

[2]A. Kramer, J. Guillory, and J. Hancock, "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks", PNAS, 2014. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111. [Accessed: 13- Mar- 2020].

World Cafe

On Tuesday's session, we had the World Cafe to find the theme that we are interested in.

In the first round, I was in the Emotion Totems theme group and was the host as well. I was pretty impressed with this theme. We conclude all the ideas' main purposes which are relieving stress and encouraging positive emotion. In the second time of round 1, we kept thinking about what we can do more. Then we thought that we should not only ask people to just express positive emotion, but the problem is also that people may not realize that they have a negative mood, they just hide it subconsciously. In this case, we discussed that we can use the idea of "emotion tracking" to record people's emotions and let them realize that they are not in a good mood, then, recall some beautiful moments to encourage people to change their mood from negative to positive.

In the other two rounds, I went to know about some other themes: Beautify the Self, Enhanced mundane spaces, Musical things, Emotional intelligence and Guided movement. We also got some great ideas from some of the themes. Such as SKYSCRAPER, we discussed using that idea and separate people by different colors of lights in different areas. And if it's using in a whole city that will be really cool.

Peer Critique

This week is about the idea presentation, I was a little bit nervous when I did the pitch but still enjoyed the ideas sharing. I reviewed all the feedbacks and generally speaking, my ideas and requirements are consistent. Still, there are some questions about the recording parts, maybe showing where the records are is necessary from the comments. I'd love to do more research and even some user testing since I notice that I thought the process of looking for the records can be fun but it also can be a problem.

Feedback

1. Some like it would be difficult to find the records.
2. Digital only
3. How do we know which area has a voice or not?
4. Nice for a family get together, spend time with friends
5. A very unique concept, almost like magic
6. I like how it extends things that most people already have and use different physical interaction would be good.

Reflection

The feedback 4, 5, 6 are quite positive which bring me confidence in my ideation and also encourage me to go further, exploring deeper of the concept.

The feedback 1, 2, 3 are contributional suggestions. They point ou the limitation of my idea which can be improved. For example, feedback 1 and 3 are more user experience focused advise. They remained me to pay attention to what the users need, not only what I preferred since I am not the target audience that the concept is designed for. In this case, user testing is a necessary step in the design process through interviews, surveys, and so on. As this recording presentation is been mentioned, it can be an option to compare with the original one from potential users in the future.

The second feedback focused on the way of presenting the idea. It does shake my mind about the design of the idea. Is it a somewhat singular presentation? Is physical interaction insufficient? This suggestion let me think over my idea and find the space to improve my idea to make my idea be more enhanced.

I was also impressed by some ideas in this week's session. There are a few themes I am interested in, like things about emotion, etc.

Titile: Story Keeper

Sketches (Ideation)

The process of how this idea came up.

Description

Story Keeper is a digital transparent glass panel which can change photo to cartoon mode with a color-filling function, and users can choose the part that they fill colors to create an audio recording. Users can listen to the recording in the future. The purpose of the Story Keeper is to allow people to experience memorable moments that make them happy, moved, grateful and so on, and then immediately record the mood of that moment in combination with the image. In the future, users will be able to recall good times by recording their feelings in photos and sounds. The process of filling in the color is to give people time to review what happened in the photo and better record their feelings, and this process can be done with your friends and family (the participants in the photo) to increase communication with each other.

Story Keeper only tells the user that there is a story record in the picture, but it does not tell the user which color block the story is on. This exploration process can also be fun, especially if it's a gift from a friend or family member. The only way to play the story record is to touch the color block where the sound was recorded. The time spent can give time to recall the story, and the voice, as an expression of feelings at the time, can better bring the receiver back to the moment.

#memoryrecording #audiorecording #pictures #colorfilling

Work Done

As the first day of taking PhysComp, I was pretty excited since I had been to the exhibition once. However, what I experienced in that exhibition made me look forward to this course but also let me feel concerned in some areas. I am looking forward to building a product with my future team and that will definitely make me feel proud but I am not good at programming. I am a little bit concerned about whether the idea can be achieved. Today's course gave me the answer. The process should be more important.

HCI Grand Challenge

Challenge 2: Human-Environment Interactions

We started by sharing the individual challenge and interpretations through the reading resource.

The most challenge that impressed me is that the technology environment is more complex at present and finding a new technology to combine all of them is already a big challenge but it is not the end. Facing the public can be more intricate since it needs to satisfy multiple kinds of people.

Then we made the conclusion with examples.

We did the first round of ideation by playing cards. Our first selection was Design to shape using smell in the nightclub with the quality of nomadic. I got the idea of using smells to match the partner in the nightclub. The costumers can select their favorite smell of a perfume to find the group with the same preference.

In the end, our group chose to Design to calm in the hospital by blowing with the quality of family. We thought that for the hospitalized patient and the family can strengthen the cohesion of each other through the synchronization of breath together to complete a song in the hospital.

How it Relates

This process of ideation this week showed a lot of possibilities of the idea that I can come up with especially it was random. This process of thinking and discussion not only brought me some inspiration but also made me review the process of generating ideas at the beginning of the design, especially after a holiday. This kind of review made me no longer clueless.

Work to Do

Next week the most important thing is the pitch. I will prepare my pitch and the poster well and practice more for the presentation.

And I am looking forward to the World Cafe in week 3.

Hey, my name is Annan and I'm in my final semester of studying a master of Interaction Design.

Based on the experience of doing projects in other courses (ie. design thinking, design computing studios, social & mobile computing, etc.), I‘m looking forward to the project in the PhysComp.

I am also looking forward to giving full play to my design ability and improving my programming ability in this class. (I'm a little concerned about my coding skills but I'm happy to learn.) I am very excited and hope to use physical materials to build the final product which can reflect the idea that makes us proud through our creativity in the exhibition.

It seems to me that finding an interesting idea is very important for this class, which will make me more motivated to carry out every step of the investigation, design and construction process.