Online pitch and critique on others’ concepts:

During this weeks’ contacts sessions, we conducted the online pitch activities via Zoom and gave and received feedback via Slack. Although we have switched to the online alternatives, our online presentations have gone well and smoothly. By watching other groups' presentations, we were provided the chance to get a better understanding their initial ideas and concepts. For two days contacts, some novel and engaging ideas were presented! We also gave our critiques to other team’s concepts by trying to give our constructive and specific suggestions.

Critiques on our concept:

After we presented our idea through the pre-recorded video, the teaching team and our peers have given us a lot of valuable and actionable feedback, which was very useful for us to refine our concept. After received feedback from Slack thread, we also organised our team’s zoom meeting to invite Lorna, tutors and our peers to discuss around our concept, so as to provide our team with deeper clarification on what we have and haven’t done well for the initial concept and what can the team concept be further refined. Through this session and these online platforms, and thanks for all the teaching staff and our peers, we gathered a lot of feedback, and detailed summary will be listed below.

Feedback summary:

Some positive ones:

1. Using human’s body as controller makes interactions engaging and intuitive.
2. Making the interaction process more acceptable and operational.
3. Providing users with freedom of control and movement.
4. Enhancing people’s interests in playing games, especially for those who hate using some physical tokens as controllers.

Some actionable and constructive ones:

1. Avoiding making users feel fatigued.
2. Going beyond the screen-based output.
3. Translating into a non-game space will be more worth exploring.
4. Exploring other parts of body as the controller.
5. Considering combining that will educational content.
6. Combining different gestures to everyday objects and day-to-day life.
7. Reducing users’ cognitive and memory loads when learn how to interact.
8. Giving users freedom to select specific body parts to control specific interactions.
9. Considering physical differences among different user groups.
10. Exploring to apply same tech and interactions into different contexts.

All the feedback from teaching staffs and our peers have provided our team a clearer way to explore our domain and the problem space. Following the given feedbacks, our team decided to do some desk research around existing solutions and then conducted user research to get to know more about our target users.

Some existing/similar technology in this field we can check out:

1. Leap motion
2. Nintendo Wii
3. Switch Gyro
4. Xbox Kinect
5. PlayStation Move
6. PlayStation Eyetoy
7. Microsoft Adaptive controller (also gather some ideas around ‘disability support’)

Team progress

In this weekend, our team had 2 meetings to discuss around the feedback we have received and how can we refine our concept as the response to these valuable feedbacks. Based on the feedback we received, we had further discussion about specifying our team’s problem space. After that, we decided to move our focus from only ‘hand gestures’ to different parts of our bodies; to go beyond only focusing on game space; to put our concept into a more day-to-day environment; to explore how to apply this technology into various contexts, to reduce the reliance of system on the screen, etc.

As for our team’s future plan, we suppose to first conduct more research around the related work in our chosen domain, and then go deeper around our team’s domain and individual focus by explore the different solutions under the umbrella of team’s domain and problem space. We also break the team section of the proposal report into different small parts and assigned them to each team member.

Individual progress

Since our team have received a lot of valuable feedback, I spent a lot of time on going through each of them in detail, and discussing them with my team, so as to decide how to elevate our team’s concept to the next level. I organised these valuable feedbacks and summarised them to some implications that we can draw on and take into consideration further.

Apart from that, I also done some research around the existing and similar solutions in our theme. By doing that, I can get a better understanding of our chosen domain, and some ideas about how to make our concept more unique.

References

img 1. retrieved from https://www.ultraleap.com/tracking/

img 2. retrieved from https://techotv.com/nintendo-wii-u-games-price-release-date-specs-reviews/

img 3. retrieved from https://www.htxt.co.za/2019/10/30/risk-of-rain-2-adds-gyro-aiming-on-switch-plus-other-console-updates/

img 4. retrieved from https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lifewire.com%2Fthmb%2FCvta8BuIe9jpARgjXxjbmJDcUtk%3D%2F1024x685%2

Improvement

1. Compressing the image file size for better display in journal post.
2. Adding the alt text description of each image

This week we did our presentations of generated concepts and critiqued others in a positive and constructive manner. These presented concepts will then be used in week 3 to further generate ideas which groups will use for their overall assessment. There were a lot of good ideas presented, with some standing out as distinctive, creative or disturbing (Smoking Baby, although it probably didn't even have to be named) with the those I liked the most being;

• The Handshake door lock, for being super creative and a simple idea that could be applied in many other scenarios or attached to other concepts
• Thinker Painting, using texture is a simple idea with 3D spaces, yet it is unexplored or could be a whole new way of working with touch that hasn't been used yet
• Mort. Using a smart stuffed toy to teach alone is a great idea, but morse code is applied so well to the toy too in a smart manner that made it charming and creative
• Naomi, turning the mundane everyday sounds you hear into music sounds both fun and creative and is something i'd be interested in doing

Written Critiques

Looking back to the presentations, I would say that the general level of concepts pitched was superb. It was interesting to see all the different ideas people had come up with being presented, and I have to say that most of them were delivered understandably and comprehensively. Moreover, only a few, in my eyes, did not meet the criteria of being a novel, playful everyday interaction.

As for my presentation, I believe I was able to convey the concept both through the pitch, poster and blog entry. With that said, I would have liked to simplify the idea to more easily be able to communicate the concept given its complexity at the time I presented it. I did find it a bit confusing what the poster was supposed to include as the brief didn't specify it and there were some contradictions as to whether it should be a simple sketch or a fully-fledged poster, so I tried to go somewhere in the middle. I wouldn't change my idea much based on what I saw, but it would be nice to specify a use case to focus on as screens with touch functionality is a vast field.

Although many concepts were interesting, I didn't get much excited by anyone project as many were quite vague. If I were to pick a couple of ideas that I found most appealing, I would choose either Artificial Conscience, the smart wardrobe concept pitched on Tuesday, or the Chroma concept which teaches colour theory.

Summary & Reflection

This week’s inspiration pitch enabled me to expose my initial idea to the whole class, and I think I have tried to present my ideas clearly and I managed to communicate my concept to the audience well.

In general, most responses for my initial concept were positive, because the most audience thought my idea has responded well to the brief, which was playful, novel, valued human values and focused on everyday life. Some people are also interested in the way in which everyday objects are used as interactive tokens, and they think it is attractive for users to experience the immersive interactions in a playful way. That has been a great pleasure for me, as my initial ideas have received positive feedback from others and may provide some inspiration for their eventual actual projects.

Some of the feedback from the audience also provided me with some valuable and constructive suggestions for further improvement and consideration of my concept, including:

• Reducing the difficulty of colour matching/choosing for users, especially novice painters.
• Considering more using contexts/scenarios.
• Enabling different users to form a closer connection.

I think most feedback provided by them were specific, actionable and objective, which inspires me to a great extent. Like taking above three feedback into account, I could provide some pre-set colour collations to lower users’ learning threshold, and allow multiple projectors to be used to connect different players, so that form a colour matching competition for the same painting. Also, creating a ‘community’ for users to share their own customised paintings for others to download and share their own colouring experience.

Documentation:

For this week, I mainly listened to others’ ideas and was also inspired by some of them. There were lots of really engaging ideas that could be potentially designed and developed to a final project that will be presented in the showcase.

We also gave critiques to others’ initial concepts, which may further provide some inspirations to them about where they did well and where they could improve. In the last hour of each day’s session, we also themed various ideas into different themes. By doing that, we were able to generate the initial sets of themes with the teaching team, which can help us better choose, extend and adapt ideas on the upcoming week’s word café session.

Actually, there were some notable projects during the presentation sessions, and many projects based around music, body control, beautification, etc. In particular, I was interested in:

• The rhythm of exercise
• Running hand
• Punching bag fountain

I was impressed by these projects mainly because they all provided new ways for users to interact with the ‘system’ and take human values into consideration. Although some of them may not totally focus on everyday life, they can consider making further improvements and putting their projects into everyday scenarios. There were actually many more ideas that were inspirational and interesting, so I was very looking forward to seeing them to be translated into some actual projects!

Improvement

1. Compressing the image file size for better display in journal post.
2. Adding the alt text description of each image

After all the concepts have been presented, we categories them under different themes. Next contact will do world cafe with these themes and form a group.

Critiques reflection

Some suggest to add sound/music to the BIBO light or make the light "breathing" maybe by making it glows when inhaling and dims when exhaling. Also, a suggestion to install a fan on it to make the whoosh sound. I think all these can be taken into consideration and experiment it later to see if they increase user experience.

In Class

This week, we had our 2-minute Project Inspiration Presentations in class. I had fun listening to everyone presenting as it was interesting to see silly and quirky ideas that I would never have thought of. I thought that it was nice to limit them to short 2-minute presentations because if it was longer, we would have all gotten bored.

We also had critique sheets to write down our opinions and comments for everyone's presentation. It did a good job keeping me focused on the presentations and made me reflect on each idea.

Inductions

I had both the Soldering 101 Induction and the 78-207 Space Induction this week.

It was my first time soldering. I was fine following the diagram to connect all the parts to the breadboard as I already learned this in DECO7230. However, for soldering, I had more trouble. I had to position everything properly to be able to fit it in the box. Positioning the switch on the other side, the height for the LED and the distance between each part to make soldering easier. I also had to use wires to connect to the battery as there were not enough battery holders for everybody.

After soldering everything, I showed it to Ben and we found out that the LED is always on even if I switch it off. This was because the solder was all touching each other. I had to separate it all and made a mess to make it work.