Documentation & Reflection

This final week involved myself finishing up the portfolio and getting myself set up for the exhibit. With the portfolio, I was able to get a good colour scheme and add it into the zone easily without any major issues. In terms of the colour scheme, I found a good site here as inspiration for my colour scheme. If you follow the link, I chose to use the "Striking and Simple" colour scheme as mine because of the nice suit it had to my prototype.

Also, I had to get me exhibit setup done and this was quite easy to do asI just needed to stick my buttons on my cupboard.

In addition, my team members and I kept working on the team report but we plan to halt this so we can all prepare for the exhibit.

To reflect, I probably should have given myself a little bit more time to clean up my portfolio as I was rushing to get it done on time. This was due to a little procrastination, as well as having slight issues that could have been fixed quite quickly. Next time, I will try to give myself enough time to get things done.

This week entailed finally getting my prototype finalised and completed before the exhibit. The multi pose interaction became very quick and easy to integrate and after giving my room mate and myself to use it together, he found that he was easily notified and he knew exactly why he was power posing. In an interview with him after it, he said, "I really enjoyed using the elevator and the pose really made me gain some confidence before my meeting as I was really concerned."

A problem I have encountered in terms of the exhibit is that because the elevator is outside, I will have to make my cupboard behind me the elevator so that I can show this live, I have also developed a quick little video to try and show the intended experience if the makeshift doesn't show what I want.

I have also been completing my portfolio and from this during the studio, I was able to get some clarification and I am planning to embed the prototype within it so that people can just use my prototype so that the cupboard as mentioned earlier doesn't transpire.

The only issues I probably have in completing everything on time would be just trying to make it as pretty as possible. As I am not the strongest in CSS in web development, I want to try and get heaps of my content for the actual portfolio to be completed so that I can give myself more than enough time to take the time to make the site look aesthetically pleasing.

Moving forward, my plans will be testing that my prototype will work with my makeshift elevator and that if someone else uses it outside of my device, that it shows the intended experience. Also once this has been completed, just adding in the final content needed and then hopefully allowing enough time to style the portfolio well.

To reflect, as I have had an issue with showing my final product for the exhibit, as the semester went on, I tried to think of ways that I could use it inside. As I was so obsessed that the whole body could be shown, I tried to make my prototype and final product that this could be possible instead of trying to see if I could work around it and this became a lot easier this week as I was given some wisdom from Dimitri on how to do this and it was painfully easy. Next time, I will try to attempt in doing something that seems impossible to try and make it possible as I could surprise myself.

Something that inspired me this week was that I had a light read of a book called Multidisciplinary Approaches to Neural Computing which presents a collection of contributions in the field of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The themes addressed are multidisciplinary in nature, and closely connected in their ultimate aim to identify features from dynamic realistic signal exchanges and invariant machine representations that can be exploited to improve the quality of life of their end users. The pdf is here.

This week involved looking at my prototype feedback and where to go from there. The main pieces of feedback I have gotten was after using the elevator, I needed to give the user some positive feedback so that it could encourage them to interact with the system next time. Furthermore, it was stated that I should find a way to attract users who won't use the system at all. The team suggested some user research into this and that is my next step to see where I go with this.

Also, as some people don't know what power poses actually posit, a team suggested that I put a brief explanation of power poses before interacting with the system. I have thought this through and listening to Alistair's report back got me thinking that I could explain what power poses were before even entering the elevator so that will be the next step in the development of the prototype. I also did mention that I was going to try and make the elevator more portable, but due to time constraints if I don't get enough time to polish that off, I will stay with my original physical layout.

I also have begun doing my portfolio and will be incrementally adding into it as the due date creeps closer. My team has also had a brief chat about the final report and what that entails for us.

To reflect, as I received some quality feedback, it did struck me that in my prototype, I didn't really look back at what my concept "actually" needed to do. Instead, I focused more on the confidence of an office worker rather than the actual enhancement of a mundane space. Further down before the exhibit, I am going to go back to my requirements and objectives to make sure that I have hit every box in terms of criteria and outcomes so I can get the best possible result and more importantly get the most out of my users and fully determine if my prototype enhances the mundane space that is an elevator

For some inspiration, in terms of the portfolio as I am not the most skilled web designer, predominately CSS, I begun looking into really well designed CSS websites and I found CSS Zen Garden which gave me some inspiration on how I could design and display my content in an aesthetically pleasing way.

This week I submitted my prototype for the first iteration. From this I thought that I needed to probably do a little more work into the video as I kind of rushed it a bit. This will hopefully be better in the next go round as I have had some experience and time with it now.

Our team also collaborated and worked together to appraise assigned team's work. To do this we all watched the videos together and had a conversation and wrote down some notes individually to see if we agreed with some points. If we disagreed, we both made our points to prove why we thought that.

From this we collated these notes into coherent comments into Miro.

To reflect on this process, I felt that we got a little switched off in watching each video one after the other as we wanted to get it done on time. This resulted in our later responses being a little small and not really specific. We did amend to these later as we took a bit more time to look into the ones that we thought weren't detailed enough. But in the future, it would have been nice to take a break in the middle of watching and appraising other teams so we could have made the most of the time and also added a heap of more detail to it.

Going forward, I have also started developing my annotated portfolio. I have looked into the criteria to see what areas I need to hit in order to get a good result.

Furthermore, once my own work gets appraised, I will take this feedback on board and refine/iterate on my work and then validate this with user evaluations to verify the aim of the prototype hasn't been forgotten with these changes.

For some inspiration this week, I read a very interesting journal article on the Problems of EndUser Developers in a Physical Computing.Task. It really opened my eyes about some issues that other teams might be facing and from listening to previous report backs, this was evident in the article's findings.

So I finally got my prototype working thanks to a long chat and collaboration with Dimitri. My issue was that I was comparing the pose before the pose was even shown.

Now the system is able to match the pose given in the image by a degree of 0.3. So it may not EXACTLY the same but it is close enough to make a comparison

I also got the opportunity to use my prototype with a member of my target audience which I will be showing in my live video. This video is below for anyone that is interested to have a look before the prototype demonstration.

From this I was able to gain some good insights from what he told me after using my prototype. One main issue was that there was no real signifier to show that he needed to copy the pose.

Going forward, I will get the video completed and look into the team's we need to appraise.

For inspiration this week, I had a look into what goes into a good prototype demonstration video and I was very interested in an IK Rig's demonstration that shows a person trying to make a system build for this from scratch and what went into it. The video is below if anyone is interested to watch it.

To reflect, I feel that I should have gotten Dimitri's help and assistance with the prototype earlier as our intended experience is pretty much the same for this prototype. Also with more people working towards a common goal, generally the time to complete things are quicker.

So this week I have been attempting to figure out how to match my poses from an image already uploaded. Currently, my approach is getting all the x,y positions of the keypoints (lefteye etc) and placing these into an array. I am also doing the same for the poses. To try and match these poses I am trying an approach that was inspired by Google's move mirror in which they try to match poses with GIFs.

To do this, one matching method they used is cosine similarity. This measure of similarity is between two vectors: basically, it measures the angle between them and returns -1 if they’re exactly opposite, 1 if they’re exactly the same. Importantly, it’s a measure of orientation and not magnitude.

Currently, I am still struggling with getting this to work due to the fact that the package I'm using to compute the similarity is having a bit of trouble to determine. Further down the track I will continue to work on this

To reflect on this week's progress, I probably should have tried this cosine similarity method earlier as I had found it earlier but just brushed it off because I thought it was too difficult. I realised that this was wrong and I should have probably tried to implement this earlier and if I got it incorrect I could have more time to try and get it right. Furthermore, I could have also asked my team members about what they have found so then if there was an easier method, I could try to implement it. To rectify these changes, I will try to make myself more available to team members and I will try to try new things earlier.

For my individual concept, I am focusing on the audience of office workers and making a pose elevator that tries to hype up workers by making them perform power poses e.g. wonder woman pose and match these in real time. Below is a screenshot of what I have so far as a concept (just using a webcam and using a colour outline of the skeleton of the user). I have just decided to use a cupboard for the elevator for now

The ideal finished product will be able to make a physical, portable elevator that can be taken anywhere and to be able to match poses properly in real time. However, due to the resources I currently have I probably can't make it portable. The only limitation for this pose concept is that the full body area has to be shown.

To reflect, during this process, I felt that I needed to be more assertive in creating this prototype as at the current moment, it is just with a timer and doesn't actually "match" the pose in the backend. I had a chat to Steven about this and he was able to clarify with me that I needed to actually code the matching process. Going forward I will try to be more assertive and ask the tutors more questions so that I can get answers quicker and I can proceed and furthermore be able to show a better effort in the further assessment pieces.

My source of inspiration for this week actually came from a skit from the Ellen show which made me think more about the awkwardness of elevators and how my concept could be abused in a way. Have a look at the video below if you're interested.

To start the week off, we looked into different methods of discovery we could use in the case of a pandemic. For the exercise, we had to look at observing passengers on a train. To do this, I watched a youtube video with people on the train being encouraged sing a song. From this I gained some insights and the going forward I will be watching youtube videos related to my concept to get some valuable information.

Also as a team, we were able to break our project down using our miro board to really break down what we need to discover in the future.

Over the past week by myself, I made a basic questionnaire for people of my target audience to fill out about what they would like to see in an elevator setting to interact with.

I also was able to look into how I could use arduino with the concept we have and something I came across was posenet, which looks at pose estimation.

The plan ahead for me is to do some arduino practice and grab some materials to start playing around and get a solid prototype going. I also will try and play around with posenet as well and see if this can work for my concept.

To start the week off, we looked into different methods of discovery we could use in the case of a pandemic. For the exercise, we had to look at observing passengers on a train. To do this, I watched a youtube video with people on the train being encouraged sing a song. From this I gained some insights and the going forward I will be watching youtube videos related to my concept to get some valuable information.

Also as a team, we were able to break our project down using our miro board to really break down what we need to discover in the future.

Over the past week by myself, I made a basic questionnaire for people of my target audience to fill out about what they would like to see in an elevator setting to interact with.

I also was able to look into how I could use arduino with the concept we have and something I came across was posenet, which looks at pose estimation. This inspired me as it looks into keypoints. The image below shows these points drawn out.

The plan ahead for me is to do some arduino practice and grab some materials to start playing around and get a solid prototype going. I also will try and play around with posenet as well and see if this can work for my concept.

To reflect, I probably could have used more work in the team activity as we didn't really go through it as thoroughly as I would have liked. For example, we left some sections blank when we could have easily gone through it and make it really good so we could go further with it. Also with my questionnaire, I probably should have tried to put more information about elevators and my questions were quite general thus the responses weren't as great as I would have liked. In the future, in team activities, I will try to make sure we have done a good enough job and also try to delve deeper and be more specific in questions.

To start the week off, we looked into different methods of discovery we could use in the case of a pandemic. For the exercise, we had to look at observing passengers on a train. To do this, I watched a youtube video with people on the train being encouraged sing a song. From this I gained some insights and the going forward I will be watching youtube videos related to my concept to get some valuable information.

Also as a team, we were able to break our project down using our miro board to really break down what we need to discover in the future.

Over the past week by myself, I made a basic questionnaire for people of my target audience to fill out about what they would like to see in an elevator setting to interact with.

I also was able to look into how I could use arduino with the concept we have and something I came across was posenet, which looks at pose estimation.

The plan ahead for me is to do some arduino practice and grab some materials to start playing around and get a solid prototype going. I also will try and play around with posenet as well and see if this can work for my concept.

In the workshop, as a team we looked into the report in more detail and we kept doing some research into our concept.

As we read through it all, we realised that our new concept didn't have a real "physical" aspect to it. After a chat with tutors about our concept, we realised that we needed to change this aspect of it to add the physical factor. To do this our team discussed potential solutions that we looked into earlier that we could consider.

In the end, the team decided to split the interactions with a single person vs several people in the elevator. To add a physical factor, for the single person, the elevator gives the user an image of a human silhouette posing. To continue, the user must pose the same for the elevator to move. This is similar to what an xbox kinect would entail in their interactions. For several people in the elevator, the elevator gives one person a charade topic then the person then acts out that and the other people have to guess what that user is acting out.

To do some research in how I would prototype this, I had a look at a speech done by Charlie Gerrand - a developer who talks about using arduino and JavaScript to create a similar experience but with street fighter. It was at the SUMMIT conference done in 2019. The video is below

Going forward, as we had already finished most of the sections of the report relating to the old concept we had previously gone with, we have to change and amend these sections to suit the new concept as well as add more research into it.

This week our team started working on the report that was due in the next week. To do this, we started by deciding and refining our concept to what we wanted. We did this by looking into the feedback and having chats on zoom and Facebook messenger as a team to see what we would like to go further with. We decided that Alistair's idea of a voice recognition system that gets people's brains working doing a simple task was the way to go. Below is his response in the Facebook group chat. This was an important milestone as it set us up for the future development and research for the concept.

From this we decided to go with this concept and we started looking into how we could prototype the experience. We also did some research into elevators and their user experience. (A research article I came up about elevators when doing my research on the mobile interaction with elevators inspired me this week, as many other avenues I didn't consider were so important to the experience. Take a read if you're interested!) We concluded that the voice recognition part could be prototyped but could be difficult. To reflect, it could have been easier to change it up by making it less about the voice and just on touch commands.

In terms of the way the team is going in the future of the concept, the team has decided to do the same concept, but focus it on different perspectives i.e. audiences. We also discussed in our zoom chat and as well with Clay about a few questions about the prototype and what would happen if we just made one prototype. He told us that we could use one prototype as a team but we needed to test different things within it. He also gave us a good idea to prototype an elevator in a cupboard at home which can be very beneficial. This has impacted us a lot as we can now have that option if we need it to happen. It also gives up the option to test a lot more things if we decide to go this way. Below is a screenshot of the zoom chat we conducted with the team

Going forward, the team and myself will need to refine, evolve and finish off the report so that it can be done to a high standard. I will be doing some more research into my chosen audience of office workers in elevators and see what experiences my prototype could bring as opposed to other audiences other team mates have considered. I also have to find some materials that I can use for my prototype.

As the course became more individual, I had to make a decision to continue the course, which I am. I'm excited for the challenge ahead and as it may not be a steady one, I hope I produce a great prototype at the other side.

In regards to my team's presentation, we all decided to continue on with the course and get through it together.

For our concept, we decided to explore Enhanced Mundane Spaces and with that, create a Dancing Elevator that gives people the chance to exercise while they are in an elevator. Our teams video is below

From here, we hope to get more user research conducted, start developing each individual outcome to focus on then go from there. To reflect, as a pandemic has forced us to not be in contact with each other as often, it would have been beneficial to communicate within the team more so then we weren't making everything last minute and we were able to have more time to check that everything was all good because I believe that we rushed it a bit.

For inspiration as our concept was inspired by the dance dance revolution mats, I found a concept that someone developed with an arduino to simulate the experience of this. The video is below.

Today's session began with a chat from Bash Isai about graduate roles and how to prepare for things such as assessment centres, internships etc. The talk also incorporated a task in which we would write a 50 word statement about who we are and what makes us unique. We narrowed this done to just one word tat described us. My word was enthusiastic

The second part incorporated our team allocation. The team I was allocated with is focusing on enhanced mundane spaces. My team members are Dimitri, Alistair and Anson. We drew up a contract that stated what to do conflict occurs and how to solve this.

We also began thinking about some ideas in the problem space such as a dancing elevator in which instead of the menial task of going up and down an elevator without any form of entertainment, the user would have to dance a combination from a dance dance revolution mat to get to their desired level.

Another idea that was explored was a space invader type situation on a floor that is interactive and can be place in menial mundane spaces such as waiting rooms

From this, the team will decide a concept to go further with and gather more insights from this idea to try and propose a plausible physical interaction for everyday life.

To reflect, in this process we probably should have focused more on other spaces as well just in case the elevator wasn't plausible for this semester. This is so we could have had a backup just in case.

After listening to Bash's chat, I actually looked him up and had a look into his portfolio and this inspired me to start thinking about the final portfolio and his portfolio design and content gave me great inspiration that I can get it completed and looking aesthetically pleasing

In today's class we went through looking at all the overarching themes that were generated in last weeks theme collection sessions. The world cafe scenario allowed us to explore different themes in three separate rounds. The themes I looked at were

Creative learning - In this theme as this was the first one we had to see what concepts we could generate from this. An idea that we cam up with was inspired by Michelle's "mort" idea in which instead of morse code, we could use it as a tool to teach simple maths in which you replace the letter with a number and the code symbols with mathematical operators i.e. + - etc. We also added that we could centre this around learning about a soft skill i.e. morse code as an example and make this creative. Below is the ideas we came up with for this

Ability centric interfaces - This theme explored trying to level the playing field in relation to people who are blind, deaf etc. The expected concepts generated tried to expose people who had these impairments but we decided to try and make the people who don't have these impairments to have an idea that anyone can interact with regardless. We came up with an interactive braile game in which you can learn braile by touch. Once again, this tied into the creative learning aspect also.

Technology with negative reinforcement - This theme tried to get people to maybe break a bad habit with negative reinforcement i.e. like my smoker baby concept. In this round we looked at the audience that could be targeted in these concepts and it was obviously people with bad habits. I came up with a concept relating to narcissism in which people stand in front of a mirror but don't look as good.

Making mundane activities exciting - this theme looked into making mundane activities and try to make them more interesting. This round we looked into trying to add more concepts and refine these also. Some ideas that came about were a mystery box fridge that like in Masterchef when you open the fridge, ingredients come out that you need to cook with as some people don't like to cook.

From all these themes I decided on my top 3 themes which were

1. Making mundane activities exciting
2. Creative learning
3. Technology with negative reinforcement

From these I hope to persue into a project that can make a learning experience that is mundane to learn and try to make it interesting.

This week we heard some project inspiration and ideas from other students which were very interesting and even after hearing some of them, many other ideas were inspired and could potentially be used as a viable concept.

On Tuesday, I also soldered together a circuit to turn a light switch on and off. Below is the example of the circuit we were provided

On the Wednesday, we listened to some other presentations and critiqued them accordingly. I was very interested in the Kids be shh concept delivered by Jessica. It could be very interesting to try and incorporate this in a school setting and see how kids react, whether the abuse this by just yelling heaps or try to make a competition out of it by trying to be the most quiet student.

From this point going forward from the themes generated from the session done on Wednesday and hopefully we can gather more ideas and narrow these into a nice coherent concept.

The idea posed from the brief outlined is a physical device called the Smoker Baby.

The main concept is that when in a crowd setting, If if they are about to smoke a baby will erode. On the other hand, if the person doesn’t smoke for a period of time (2 hours), the baby will develop and after two weeks if the smoker hasn’t smoked, the baby will grow to its absolute peak.

It could a cube with LEDS with red and green to represent body parts that have been affected. So the baby would either become really red or really green. This can be further explored.

This was inspired by two things, the smoker shock bracelet, shown in the poster which shocks people before they smoke; and the fact that smoking still is prevalent around 16% of Australian people aged 18-24.

The poster developed is below.

The baby will be given with a few deformities to begin with, so that the smoker has an incentive to quit. This can make it playful as it can look very weird and humorous.

This sketch could represent a person who has quit for the two weeks

This sketch could represent someone who has struggled to stop smoking or it could be what someone may get as a starting point.

However, this can be changed to something else as the concept progresses however as long as it has a positive impact as smokers need this to release dopamine.

I am in my final semester of BInfTech(Software Design). I am hoping to learn more about more about physical computing and use the skills I have learnt thus far to produce something very interesting and exciting for other user's to interact with.

I am a team player who will do any task assigned to me to the best of my ability. I am also very organised, so I won't have any tasks late or to a somewhat low standard.

I'm very keen to meet everyone and see what we all produce at the end of the semester