Interactive Flower LOME

The Team Domain

Negative emotions and pressure people experience from intensified workload, pursuing of perfection, obsession with completion and exhaustion of balancing family relationships are becoming a general phenomenon. Workers who have obligations to a family are accounted as the majority labor force in metropolitans. To avoid the damage of negative emotions and relevant mental issues caused by, the team will design an interactive tool to help users to express their feelings and raise family concerns. The interactive flower will help people under stress to speak out and release negative emotions by complaining towards the flower and replacements of the flower petals.

The Individual Concept

The individual concept differences from the team domain by narrowing user groups, it's focused on parent-child relationships. One of reason doing this is because children are less presentable in terms of wants and needs, and parents need to raise concerns in the important stages of their children. (Manzeske, 2009) The study shows that a child who has a secure relationship with parents tends to regulate emotions and behaviours while experiencing difficulties. Thus, the individual concept will try to explore more interesting ways of interactions and promote the playability for children

Working Principle

1. This is when too many complaining received through the microphone.

1. User can play games and answer the question right to make the flower become green or take the petal out and place it back again to reset the green colour.

1. When user continues by answering questions right and repeat the placement action, the whole flower become green.

1. This state is the extra bonus to engage users with games.

What I did

Development Plan

The New Concept

Based on the feedbacks received from presentation, there are some iterations regarding the concept. Lowe is an interactive tool designed for stress relief. The initial state of Lome has five pieces of petals in green and red. The green reflects the positive emotions expressed and the red reflects negative emotions such as anger, sadness, anxiety and frustration. Lome is able to record user's speech and repeat it in an interesting animation tone. If there are more than ten negative key words recorded, one piece of petal will change the colour from green to red. Complaining might get a bad rap, but it's not always a bad thing to vent the feelings out — especially if user feel stressed. If there are lots of negative feelings recorded to turn all petals red, user can choose to take out one red petal to the bud which can hold one extra petal. Then, the red petal can change to green while it's placed back to the flower.

Domain Explore

These days, the majority of social productivity is contributed by workers who have a family. Difficulty of balancing work and family and personal life is becoming the stress worth to concern. The stress from family and work is mutual. Work stress can affect the family intimacy and family stress can affect job performance and satisfaction. To balance the personal life and family, an interactive tool to help user releasing stress before entering home can let everyone in the home realise user's low mood. Lome can act as a reminder to tell others if user is in a good mood or not so that family support can work on negative emotions.

Intro

Through Watch2Together, presentations were presented smoothly. Critiques received on slack gave us the chance to review and refine the concept. I hope feedback can be received in the same delivery for the following presentations. I appreciate those wonderful feedbacks gave by peers and gonna review their comments in this journal.

Critique

Family User

People living in the room can know the mood of the roommate and choose the appropriate way to communicate with the partner. If it's in a home environment, it could be a good device to communicate within the family around how the day was and how the user feel during the day. This may be the case when the husband comes home, he can understand his wife's emotions by seeing the color of the flowers. This device can be placed in a close community like twin-shared room. People live in the room can know housemate's mode and choose a proper way to communicate with mate.

Encourage User to be Positive

It's worth to note that for some people, having a swearing is a mode of stress relief to improve their mode. So that Lome will provide a way to offload user's negative emotions instead of punishing interactions while expressing negative emotions. This suggest inspire us to let Lome become a companion for users when they wanna speak out their's frustrations. Lome will record user's sentence and repeat these complaining words in a funny tone.

Make Users Realise Their Emotion

There are lots of interactions that could be done by touching the physical flower and making users aware of their emotional state. Lome will lead people to know themselves better by showing the different colour of the flower. One thing is interesting, people involved in negative emotions might don't have the skill to realise the emotion they are experiencing. If red represents the negative and green means the positive emotion, user can take one piece of the red while they are complaining. After the complaint, the piece can be put back on the flower and return to green colour.

Concept

The design is based on things to represent, communicate and mediate emotions. The flower is designed to let user be comforted by natural plant smell and colourful lights. Users can record their thoughts or simply speak out to the flower when they are in low mood. Also, when they are clipping their hands, the flower will shine colourful lights and release natural smell to comfort them.

Research

Smell and Emotion

An experiment by [1]Weber and Heuberger (2008) exposed the effects of smells impacted on the cognitive states. The experimental participants smelled different plants and then rated the pleasantness of smell, their mood, calmness, and alertness on a scale. Compared to a controlled group, participants smelling the plants evaluated themselves more positively in mood, alertness, and calmness. However, there was a follow-up experiment that found artificial smells did not improve emotional functioning as natural effects.

A study by Pollatos et al. (2007) focused on the relationship of affective pictures, oflactory performance and sex. The sample consists of 32 subjects (16 males). Olfactory performance was examined after flowing unpleasant pictures presentation for all subjects and pleasant pictures for male subjects only. The level of pleasantness and intensity of neutral over-threshold odors is related to the valence of the picture. The odor was rated as unpleasant after viewing the unpleasant visual experience. However, positive presentation of pictures induced a significant increase in reported odor pleasantness. Besides, the results showed male may be susceptible to this cognitive and top-down influence.

[1] Weber and Heuberger, “The impact of natural odors on affective states in humans”, 2008. [Online]. Available : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18353767

[2] Pollatos et al, “Emotional Stimulation Alters Olfactory Sensitivity and Odor Judgment”, 2007. [Online]. Available:

https://academic.oup.com/chemse/article/32/6/583/317236

Technique Supports

1. High quality LEDs: super bright 2835 SMD RGB LED, waterproof, long life span (in excess of 50,000 hours). Low power consumption and environmental friendly.
2. WIFI wireless smart controller:16 million colors, smart phone control, timer mode, work with Alexa. It can also make the lights lighting with the rhythm of music in your smart phone, by using 1 App to control many Wi-Fi controllers at the same time.
3. Support for color and dynamic mode customization and preservation
4. Lights and music sync functions
5. A variety of built-in dynamic model, and the custom dynamic model

The aroma diffuser will be used to support smell function. Frangance put inside the container and smell come out from the top. The diffuser will be shaped like a green pot for flower.

Record Key: Press the button to start record the voice.

Play Key: Press the button to start playing recorded voice.

There are two control buttons, one for recording, the other for play.

The sound clear and loudly, can help you express feelings, or message tips,

The sound sensor switch is consider to control the led lights by clapping hands or speaking loud.

Target audience

The young adults who are interested on making new friends.

WHAT

It can used at any occasions of party. When there is a family union for Christmas, birthday or other festivals, party cup can be used. Places like bars or clubs will use this kind of glasses a lot. Party cup is designed for fun and funky looks while drinking. It presents beautiful lights when cups collide. every cup has a sensor built inside.The sensor on will detect two colors from different cup to get the mixed color. It is a communication drive activity which is a simple game to help people to make more friends.

The bridge of communication (why):

This concept is mainly focused on help young adults making new friends. Normally, many young adults are projected to be nervous, they only interact with familiar people. this concept is to drive audience to collide with new people.

Secial interactions:

The hoster of this party will display a color mix on the main screen. guests are encouraged to walk around to looking for some one to cheer with them to reach the goal. For example, hoster show a purple one screen. green cup and blue cup should look for each other. And then, people can drive and talking with each other and enjoying a wonderful time.

This game has a reward system that that if audience can mix more color they can get free drinks, which means they most frequently collide with otrhers.

The excepted tools for this concept:

Cups, LED lights, sensor, and database. The sensors are used to detect two different lights when people collide cups, and then change it to mixed color. the database is used to store colors and recoding the progress of each audience.

challenges:

he cost of this concept is projected to be high.

How to build the database to store and connect with sensor needs to do more research.

How to use algorithm to avoide people to get same col or or cannot pair with others.

Class Activities

In the Tuesday workshop, I attended the discussions of different topics. I have been hosting for two rounds, beautify yourself and everyday sustainability. In terms of beautify self, we focused on different interactions of emotion detective jacket. For example, a compliment changes the look of the jacket, changing design based on mood and environment and to match colour to tell people near who has the same interest. In the case of everyday sustainability, we discussed targeting people that unaware sustainability and individual effect to collaborative sustainability effect.

Group Discussion

We categorised the ideas written on the emotional totems and tried to get some inspirations from it. We got four category, interaction method, target audience, target audience and purpose.

Pitch feedbacks & reflections

Considering colour with emotions:

I received this suggestion from people sitting in the same group. To make interactions more playful, different colours can be used to represents user's status. For example, blue means looking for someone who has same hobbits. Pink represents the user is matched with someone. Different colours give user more informations about others and encourage them to make conversations when they are not knowing each others.

Comments on other's pitch

![Imgur] (https://imgur.com/ubRywkZ)

Soldering

78-207

Pitch feedbacks & reflections

Considering colour with emotions:

I received this suggestion from people sitting in the same group. To make interactions more playful, different colours can be used to represents user's status. For example, blue means looking for someone who has same hobbits. Pink represents the user is matched with someone. Different colours give user more informations about others and encourage them to make conversations when they are not knowing each others.

Comments on other's pitch

![Imgur] (https://imgur.com/ubRywkZ)

Soldering

78-207

WHAT

Party cup is designed for fun and funky looks while drinking. It presents beautiful lights when cups collide. Any container can hold drink or alcohol is considered as the model of party cup. Mostly glass of wine or whisky shows and reflects fancy LED lights. It has a button to switch off while the cup or glass is not using.

WHERE

It can used at any occasions of party. When there is a family union for Christmas, birthday or other festivals, party cup can be used. Places like bars or clubs will use this kind of glasses a lot. Not only helps people to interact with each others more, but also to reflect the light in the dark and find the container easily.

HOW

Regarding interaction modes, there are many ways. For example, it shows colourful flashing light while adding drink. Also, if glasses collide, the glass reflect different colour of lights for few minutes. The impact of two different colour gives a third colour according to the primary colour theory. Like yellow mix with blue is equal to green.

Poster

Inspirations

A collision of lights

Human as Group