World Cafe

In this week's session, we are mainly doing activities called world cafe. To run this activity, we need to switch tables with new people talking about the main topics grouped based on previous pitch concepts. Each round has two question slides and we need to discuss and put the insights down on the draft. Also, for each round, one of the people sitting on the table needs to stand out and stay as a host for the new coming group members. I was honored to be host twice, it was a bit awkward but fun in general haha!

Round 1: Context

1. What could the project be?
2. What problem does it solve?
3. What space is it exploring?
4. Draw from theme inspirations?
5. Think "Blue Sky"

Round 2:Domain

1. Who are we designing for?
2. Where could the project be applied?
3. Which situations?
4. What experiences are we designing?

Round 3: Refined

1. How could the concept be realised?
2. What approaches could we take?
3. How could we do it?

Bonus: Guest Time!

We had a very special guest sharing his life in London as a product designer, which is fun and I did learn a lot! (Like culture differences, office rules and what the employees are expecting)

Lastly, we picked our favorite topic(idea) and formed a group afterward.

The Pitch

In week two, we are mainly focused on presenting ideas we generated from last week and giving comments on others' pitch.

In general, I don't think I was well prepared :(

At first, I was pretty confident about my idea along with my poster, however, I forgot to practice my public speaking skills. My voice was a bit shaking when giving the pitch, and was super nervous about the timing. As for other work, most of the people using everyday objects as interactive facilities, "super crazy stuff from sci-fi fiction" is rarely seen. The whole presenting session is pretty fun to get involved since I got many inspirations from the projects of others. I personally like the "pretty closet" one, which the user can try out the style they are thinking of instead of putting them on for real. I guess I will purchase one if it's out haha!

(My pitch draft)

The Sessions

I also attended two workshops this week.

Soldering 101

This is an experimental class in a lab, we played with Arduino USB board which connects to the computer with a standard USB cable and also other kits. Once we finished setting, we spent half of the class on soldering which is to connect wires by ironing-ish. Its temperature is extremely dangerous high, I accidentally touched it with my fingertip and I burnt. Sad story :(

78-207 Space Induction

This is an hour introduction to lab safety, and I am happy to get familiar with these instructions before start building in later assignments.

Idea Explanation

I had so much playing this little project! Since millions of people nowadays have obesity, the burden of excess weight is much more than meets the eye. This chronic, debilitating condition leaves people prone to many serious illnesses, including heart disease. So how to save the world? Oh I mean, to help people lose weight using technologies?

Here comes Nutrition Wristband!

What is this?

The Nutrition Wristband is a wearable device designed for building healthy eating habits, and the target groups are mainly focusing on people with excess weight, and the wristband will help users by coming up with a smart grocery list, adjusting grocery price and interacting with reminders to control the diet to get users' weight-loss and keep fit.

And the inspiration is simply from the scale of the marketplace.

How does it work?

1. Fill out your information(such as height, weight, allergic, etc though App on your phone, then connected with the wristband.
2. Based on the previous data collection, a list of food has been recommended, along with a budget that has been decided. Now easily put on the wristband and get groceries.
3. 3. Please note there will be no price tag for any kind of food in the supermarket, you need to get close to the food you want so the "price" will be sensed and shown on your wristband. If the food is on the recommendation list, you will get the market price; if you picked food out of the list, you will get 10 times its market price. For an example, normally you pay 2 bucks for a can of coke since it checked out by the price on your wristband, so now its turn to 40. Will, you still considering buying it? Maybe not.

what the interaction modes are?

1. Emotion: The wristband will interact with a happy face when you picked food that is on the list, and show a sad face when you pick something else.
2. Colour: Sometimes the face icons can be easily confused at a glance, but strong colors are easily distinguishable. For a happy face, it will be painted with bright yellow and the sad face will be applied with a significant red.
3. Motion: The wristband will also interact with two kinds of vibration. When you trying to purchase inappropriate food, you get a light vibration for 3 seconds. However, when the total price of your shopping cart exceeds the budget, you will get a strong non-stop vibration until you put things back or press "stop" manually.

So umm you can eat healthily and save time and money on fast food I hope~

Check the poster out!

Tuesday:

At the beginning of the course, we went through the course learning goals and tasks outline completely. Following that, we had discussed what our expectations are and what kind of fear we have or might be facing.

For me, I am expecting to get the most interaction design process concepts out of the course since it sounds like a big but vague title. And to be honest, I am a little worried about if I can always stay focus when attending courses that had such long hours. Plus I had no previous experience to get both my hardware and software connected. Which will be fine(hopefully haha) as long as I keep working hard on it.

Following that, we discussed and share examples of physical computing projects on Slack. I personally like the previous "MAGIC SKIRT" the most, because it combined educated and entertained experiences nicely for users. The one I picked is called " VR is doing the full-size car"https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185109-inside-fords-virtual-reality-prototyping-lab-why-make-full-size-clay-cars-when-vr-will-do . Simply I found this is fascinating that how the traditional industry(Ford) embraces the advancement of technology.

Wednesday

The first part of Wednesday is to discuss the Seven HCI Grand Challenges, and I was allocated to group 5, where we talked about accessibility and universal access. This topic is highly active engaged not only in other design courses but also in the overall research community, which is decided to ensure the product or services can be used on an equal basis with users who are old or with disabilities.

And then I got my little "Phys Comp" Box!

In the second part of the day, we had fun but challenging project ideation, which using a set of playing cards generate a sentence to encourage fresh ideas by corresponding to a list of words. The first-round is group brainstorming, and second-round is individual ideation. Then we shared the "best of the table " with the whole class.

For me, I got "Empower Desert Fire Forever" as my keyword, and the final generation is super funny: There is a love game in the desert, where the participants need to find the frustrated partner and cheer him/her up by promising they will won’t be apart forever so they are empowered to use fire for heat to survive. And here is the first idea: The high demand in the oil production from the desert empowered the never-ended oil fires. Anyways, I enjoyed it a lot!

Hi, Deco3850 people!

I am Zhishan Yan, usually go by Sulan. I am currently in the final semester of my IT bachelor degree, how excited!

The biggest expectation for this course of my is to explore the unfamiliar field such as hands-on skills and back-end coding, as well as the design process on a deep level. Even though I had taken some deco courses but still can be vague when it comes to concepts, hopefully by taking this course, I will have a better and solid understanding from it.

Work hard and good luck!