Continuing The Course

The last week has been quite a mixture of emotions, confusion and thinking about the future. With COVID-19 making a huge impact to the course, it has definitely brought upon new challenges and directions to take. Regardless, I'm still excited and ready to continue the course with all the changes to come, although am quite nervous about taking on the task with a more individual outlook as I don't feel very strongly in my programming skills.

Group Chats

Upon discovering the changes to the course, we sadly lost a team member within the group. Upon discussion with the remaining team members, we revised our initial idea of the chair as it felt like a more complex idea to create as an individual. The idea that we've come up with explores changing energy consumption habits through implementing factors of discomfort. We felt that through an individual aspect, this might be something that might be less difficult to tackle.

Research Questions

We conducted initial research questioning to collect some ideas that we could explore. The following questions and responses were recorded:

Q1. What energy consumption habits do you want to change?

• Taking shorter showers
• Using phone less
• Using and buying less plastic
• Reduce power usage at home
• If it’s too cold/hot for the dogs
• Outside door is left open
• Devices/tvs/lights left on
• Cleaning not done
• Air conditioner/heater left on

Q2. What response would bother you? (e.g. sound, light, social media shaming)

• Sounds that keep happening for a really long time
• Spamming of the same message
• High cost
• Stops them from pursuing hobbies
• Stops them from going out
• Alerts on phone
• Creates more mess
• Loud noise
• Speaking (e.g. yells ‘Help me!” when someone walks past)
• Complaining about how cold it is etc.

Q3. What form? (e.g. small box, plant, unappealing v appealing?)

• Something that is too heavy to move
• Something stuck in position
• Wetness
• Embedded in the bad habit
• Emotional connection

The Concept

Based on the responses we received, we came up with the concept of a small portable object that playfully annoys and disturbs users when they have committed a negative energy consumption habit, ie. leaving the aircon running when not present. The user will be alerted after a certain time through an annoying sound initially (potentially the ball complaining), however if they do not take any action, then it will continue to annoy them through flashing lights, vibrations and annoying sounds. The goal is that the user becomes annoyed and made to feel uncomfortable which forces them to fix the problem. Hopefully with constant annoyance, this will improve their habits of being more energy efficient at home.

Possible ways to explore and create this that were discussed were varying sensors to measure light, sound, water and movement detection. Sensors is not something that I have had much experience with however, so I'm hoping that it won't be too challenging for me. In saying that though, I'm definitely ready to step out of my comfort zone and explore something new!

We are still confused about the future of the project and our ability to be able to develop such a project with all the big changes, so hopefully after the presentations this week we will have more of an understanding and more confidence in the concept and ourselves!

Project Inspirations Ideas

I had a few different ideas for my project inspiration presentation and these are the ones that did not make the final cut.

Shoes

p.s. I used the third idea (bottom right) as my final project inspiration.

I was browsing through the internet to see whether any of my ideas already existed when I found a shoe that is similar to my first idea.

GPS Shoe

The shoe has LEDs in the toes of the shoes. The LED lights on the left shoe point the wearer to their destination and the right shoe shows the distance.

https://weburbanist.com/2012/09/27/no-need-for-directions-with-gps-shoes-to-guide-you/

Social

For these ideas, I designed them with introverts in mind. Some introverts have trouble communicating with other people and some of them want alone time and a personal space for themselves.

In the first week of classes we did some idea generating exercises the first being based off the seven challenges of Human Computer Interaction. The group I was with was assigned Environment Based Challenges where problems posed by individuals interacting with the increasingly evolving intelligent environment we live in today. We did a number of exercises going through our individual interpretations of the article and then summarizing the points we found into a more concise list of issues that should be thought about and addressed in design in the future. The second brainstorming activity we did involved using playing cards and randomly generated words to come up with interesting contextual scenarios in which an idea space was created. Seen in the picture below with the cards and word key that were used to generate the sentences. This was rather enjoyable with the group at my table as we had some good ideas along with many silly ones which still worked. Seen below are some of my interpretations of using the sentence: "Design for Disconnecting in a cemetery using hopping and the argumentative quality".

These exercises were quite useful in generating interesting ideas and concepts which will be needed for our presentations next week.