Before Submission

By Tuesday, we had all delivered our prototype documents and uploaded the videos. I did most of my video and document last week but made some last changes on Monday. Given that our team chose to build separate parts of the same concept, as explained in previous posts, we also found it most useful to create a team-based video and include that in our videos. Looking at the finished video, I believe it turned out quite good and that we did well in creating the team-based video. Everything revolving the video and document took much longer than I expected, so for the last couple of weeks, I have focused more on PhysComp than my thesis.

Tuesday and out

From Tuesday and out, we focused solely on writing our feedback to the other teams, responding to the few questions we got and starting to look over the feedback we received. After meeting up for the studio on Tuesday, we all gathered and started to write out feedback. First, we tried to have one person share their screen and watch the videos together like so, to be able to play and pause along the way to comment. However, we quickly found this ineffective and started to watch the videos on our own and then meet up between videos to read the documents, discuss them and come up with rough bullet points with feedback. For the first group, we started to write summaries of our bullet points before going to the next person's video. For the second team, we just wrote down bullet points from the video and documents, discussed them to come up with more and then moved on. Before starting on the third group some members of the team wanted a break, and some wanted to go on. After discussing for a bit, we came up with an asynchronous solution where two of us, Thomas and I, continued to the last group straight away and the two others to come back and do their review of the last group later. Moreover, Thomas and I were to summarise the comments for the second group as everyone had already written their comments for them and then Tuva and Marie could summarise the third group when they reviewed them later that day. In my opinion, this solution worked much better and was more effective. We decided to go through all summaries after Thursday's workshop, before commenting on Miro.

For the rest of the week, I had to focus on my master thesis given that I had focused on PhysComp for a long time and had to pick up the slack on the thesis. Besides the feedback, this week was quite uneventful.

Work Done This Week

This week we presented our pitch to the class this week. Furthermore, we also provided feedback to all who presented. This was a very valuable task to further support our fellow peers to ensure that everyone was provided detail feedback which will ultimately help improve the overall quality of their concept.

This week also saw the commencement of the 'virtual classes' whereby studio session was conducted via Zoom. It was not all smooth sailing due to a few technical difficulties to ensure stable connection during the class video call.

Individual Preparation Work

Individual Research

Colour Theory

Colour theory is a term used to describe the collection of rules and guidelines regarding the use of colour in art and design, as developed since their early days. Colour theory informs the design of colour schemes, aiming at aesthetic appeal and the effective communication of a design message on both the visual level and the psychological level.

Modern colour theory is heavily based on Isaac Newton’s colour wheel, which displays three categories of colours: primary colours (red, blue, yellow), secondary colours (created by mixing two primary colours), and intermediate or tertiary ones (created by mixing primary and secondary colours). Colours can be combined to form one of the five main colour schemes that allow designers to achieve harmony in their designs. These are:

Tetradic using two sets of complementary pairs

Colour temperature is another vital consideration in design—by distinguishing between warm, cool, and neutral colours, we apparently have the power to evoke emotional responses in people. Warm colours are those with shades of yellow and red; cool colours have a blue, green, or purple tint; neutral colours include brown, grey, black, and white. While these groupings hold true in a general sense, emotional responses to colours can also be heavily affected by gender, experiences, cultural associations, and other personal factors. Consequently, researching the traits and expectations of a target audience is vital for not only fine-tuning the positive impact of colour used in design but also preventing design failure.

Common Feedback and Further Works

After presenting our pitch, common feedback received from the academic staff and fellow peers was to further investigate and research the link between music and colour theory.

Hence, as a result, I found the following:

There have been many studies and academic research papers which have indicated the relationship between the use of music and colour theory as a behaviour modifier. I have found many papers which have indicated that healing has been linked to the use of the arts, in particular, music and colour because of their innate ability to bring about mental, emotional and physical calmness. Although much has been written on the use of colour and music as relaxants specifically within a nursing/medical context, there appears to be little information available as to why music and colour have this calming effect. This article examines music and colour as relaxants by briefly describing the neurological and physical mechanisms that bring about the effect of relaxation. This brief exploration is placed within the context of learning disability care. The aim is to provide ideas for a more peaceful and relaxing environment for an adult with learning disabilities who also has autism and exhibits severe challenging behaviour. The results of a small case study and implications for other areas of nursing are discussed.

Sources:

• https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/bjon.1999.8.7.6649?casatoken=8TqfItljGSYAAAAA%3AWB63lDHwoeOyCiGyrEpymzYwSQLDNBBtcSOgfYgVTl2xxx8t5OBjrhMzlVufDlyu5a18LhKtkAYM7s&
• https://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall02/V22.0380-001/color_theory.htm
• https://generalassemb.ly/blog/color-theory-emotional-impact-right-colors-design/
• https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Rb59CAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=colour+theory+research+paper&ots=GToS0mLdeU&sig=vNX9ww_YOgCcWJOBToiPc1lYGrQ#v=onepage&q=colour%20theory%20research%20paper&f=false
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/751049?casatoken=U7zUQjjiQ0cAAAAA:EzJTTZCekBY7ksgZUNXDrR1pSfzKjc2K40IV0xzLviC0U9aKyR4b3KqRD9TwwnXHYC2GwjPjTcT3dstv82rBypkutpx0YvhWEZZ5gRCoPTHLn91cB9pLg&seq=1#metadatainfotab_contents
• https://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/232/1/49.short?casatoken=2Pi4xqw1EL4AAAAA:j4w6CE6Y8-klFPVYsOqAQjdoowj3VrTMYix5r4TXVbPn0rn9zWrhUeQnc8TBSqVXLud0GQ5h1SwmWDD

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

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