This week, we needed to pitch our ideas to the studio. Therefore, we really needed to solidify our concept and idea. Prior to this, it was obvious in our group discussions that each individual had their own interpretation of the theme. Therefore, I suggested for the team to all go and further design the theme concept space and report back to the team.

As a result, below was my own interpretation of the theme space:

Enhance Mundane Spaces

Definitions

Enhance: intensify, increase, or further improve the quality, value, or extent of.

Mundane: lacking interest or excitement; dull.

Spaces: position (two or more items) at a distance from one another, be or become euphoric or unaware of one's surroundings, especially from taking drugs

To Enhance

• You empower

To be Mundane

• Mundane tasks

o Use your curiosity to enjoy activities such as washing dishes and organizing.

o vacuuming, doing dishes, or dusting the house

o activity you dislike

• It is not a choice, rather it is a must

• Something you dislike

• Something you find discomfort

To NOT be Mundane

• Spark curiosity (https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/what-matters-most/201705/how-deal-boring-or-mundane-tasks)

• Challenging/complex task

• Strength of creativity

• Prudence strength to organise

• Stay focused, using self-regulation strength

• Appreciation of beauty

Inspirations:

* https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263594631MundaneMobilitiesPerformancesandSpacesof_Tourism

• https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/what-matters-most/201705/how-deal-boring-or-mundane-tasks

Reflection on this exercise

This was a great concept as it allowed all group members to share their interpretation to ensure that we captured a holistic interpretation of the theme space. By employing this method, the team was able to freely devise and formulate their own ideas which were shared and further refined as a group without the fear of subconscious judgement

Video Call - Bash

I enjoyed the video call from Britain as Bash had some excellent advice. Although I was already familiar with the information that he gave, having spent countless hours looking at employability before, I still enjoyed hearing about his story.

Team Formation

I wasn't too surprised with the team I received given that I tried to team up with people I know can do good work by putting my notes close to those I'd like to work with rather than the most exciting theme. This decision is a result of previous semesters where I've been in teams where a couple of us have to pull the weight of other group members. Given that I'm doing my thesis, I can't afford yet another semester where I have to spend enormous amounts of energy and time making up for the shortcomings in other people's work, as my thesis progress took a significant hit last semester. The negative aspect of this is that this team will have similar input to me given our same cultural backgrounds, whereas the positive side is that I know they can all do great work. I believe our group will be fully capable of producing a captivating concept and have a lot of fun while doing so. I hope that, in this course, we can focus on ideas that are more physical than digital as I'm interested in learning more than just web and app design.

The first thing our team did was to sit down and write up a team agreement, with one team member joining us on Discord. After the class, we decided to have a meeting to start ideation. There, we discussed the theme, emotional intelligence, and produced as many ideas as we could. We chose to focus on two aspects, input and output, whether they should be internal or external, physical or digital, and how they could be combined. After coming up with some initial ideas, we opted to plan a meeting for Friday to choose one concept to move forward. Previous to the meeting, we were all to come up with two additional ideas.

My Two Ideas

Thomas and I sat down to ideate a couple of ideas on a train ride back from a friends house. The first concept I ideated is a wristband that senses when you fidget with it, as one often can do when bored, making the device glow brighter to show your boredom and promoting human interaction. The second idea was the 'shrieking box', which you throw as hard as you can into the air. The further and faster it travels, the more loudly it shrieks, emphasising the emotions of the pitcher.

Friday's Meeting

After having presented and discussed our additional two ideas, we tried to look for combinations between them and the ones we came up with, in the previous ideation session. We chose to pursue the high-level concept of angry birds of emotions. This concept combines the emoji balls, different coloured balls with emoji faces to throw at people, from the first ideation session with a physical Angry Birds like game. We explored various input and output methods for the concept, amongst others, including sounds in the emoji balls from the shrieking box idea; Filling up different emoji balloons to visualise emotional output from the first ideation session, and many more. What we realised is that we have a lot of great ideas for input and output, and should conduct user interviews to narrow down to the best options.

After coming up with a concept to present, we started to put together the presentation and divided tasks amongst ourselves. Thomas and I were supposed to create a storyboard, Marie was to make illustrations, I was to make a visual theme for the presentation and Tuva put together most of the presentation. Moreover, we planned to have an additional meeting on Monday to finalise our presentation and rehearse ahead of the pitch on Tuesday, however, due to uni closing down a week, we postponed the meeting in case the format of the presentation would change.

Tuesday

World cafe

In the world cafe, we have developed a variety of ideas.

round 1 context

round 2 audience & domain

round 3 refine

In the first two rounds, we tried to broaden our thinking and think of more possibilities for the theme. In the third round, we started to chose an attractive idea to refine it. I post these results below.

In fact, in the process, I felt that I had misunderstood many concepts, which affected the progress of our third round. Each round is only 15 minutes, which is not enough for discussion. I need more time to think about topics that interest me.

After the world cafe, I have chosen the aspect of body control as my favorite theme.

Wednesday

Mobile sharing

In Wednesday's contact, a graduate from UQ shared his interview experience. He pointed out the importance of self-introduction. The unique personality can attract others to hire you.

The sentences like:

My name is...

I am unique because...

can help us describe ourselves.

Team formation and ideation

After that, I had the first meeting with my team members. We have shared our contact details and build our team chart quickly. And we also have started generated our initial concept based on the inspirations from our classmates and brainstorm.

Brainstorm

As you can see, we tried to expand our thoughts. Because our theme is related to body control, we listed the composition of the body and what it can do. We want to create an interesting interaction by doing this. And also, we found some inspirations from the internet and add some themes we want to explore more in the future.

Future work

We plan to narrow down our ideas and prepare for the presentation next week. We will use the concept map to find the ideal concept and develop it more detailed.

World Cafe

Beginning the week with World Cafe was quite exciting. I had already done a form of this in DECO3500 and quite enjoyed the activity, so it was great to be able to do this again with a variety of different topics. In my previous journal post I listed some of the themes that I was interested in exploring, so this activity gave me a chance to do that, as well as meet more people in the class.

The topics that I had a chance to explore were Change Through Discomfort, Change Through Positive Reinforcement, Emotional Totems, Sassy Tech, Bothersome Tech and Creative Learning. Throughout this activity I hosted twice, which was exciting however it would have been nice to see some other people step up to host so that I could explore one last topic. In saying that though, it did allow me to take on a slight leadership role, which is something that I have been trying to improve upon.

After exploring these topics and brainstorming some weird and wacky ideas, the top four topics that really intrigued me were Change Through Discomfort, Change Through Positive Reinforcement, Sassy Tech and Bothersome Tech. I definitely think the themes that I'm interested in overlap in some way which I found quite interesting.

Chatting With Bash

To continue the week, former UQ graduate Bash Isai, chatted to the cohort online all the way from London. It was really interesting to hear his experiences and he gave us some valuable tips on how to get a job. I had come across the idea of job recruiters as my partner has one of his own but I didn't realise how easy and useful they could be. I definitely am going to be looking into finding myself a recruitment agent!

He also conducted this insightful activity which began with us writing 50 words about ourself, and then continuously cutting it down until we had three words. From those three we had to select the one that best represented us. The three that I ended with were unique, genuine and exceptional, however I thought that genuine was the word that best encompassed myself and my attitude as a whole.

Meeting The Team

It was finally the day to meet the team! I'm happy with my team as I've never had the opportunity to work with any of them and so far it seems like we've been getting along well. We do all struggle a bit with programming though so that should be quite interesting, although we've made an agreement to work on any kind of programming bits together. I got my first preference of Change Through Discomfort which is awesome, meaning that I'm excited to get into the course!

We dived straight in, coming up with a team name (Negative Nancies) and listing out potential bad habits to explore. Through this process, we placed a tick next to ideas that we thought would be interesting to pursue as they seemed more suitable for the semester project.

We further pursued some of these ideas, exploring potential interactions that could be possible ideas to target throughout the course. As we brainstormed, the topic of implementing discomfort towards sitting down for too long looked promising. We brainstormed quite a few fun ideas for it, so it's looking like this may be what we decide to explore! We currently haven't decided upon what characteristics we want to implement in the chair, but with the next assessable coming up in less than next week, we should have a drafted idea soon!

Reflection

Today in the studio we undertook an activity whereby we grew existing inspirations to develop and share our own ideas. This process is called "World Cafe".

Personally as I reflect on Today's process, what makes such a seemingly simple practice — that of talking together about things that we set out during our studio 2 and developed and intentionally linking the essence of our conversations with students. Through our informal conversations, it offers us the opportunity to notice the possibilities for mutual insight, innovation, and action. I feel, through using this World Cafe methodology process, it offers a unique mixture of freedom and focus, of coherence without control.

Work Done

Today during World Cafe, we were able to experience and learn/ immerse our understanding of other ideas and general themes. This was another stage in the ideation process in which we undertook to seek inspiration to generate a brilliant idea.

Three rounds were involved whereby specific tasks/focus areas were explored. In the first 2 rounds, with each different concept/theme, I encouraged the group to define each of the words in the theme. This allowed the group to mutually understand and gather everyone's interpretation of the theme. Without restricting a specific idea on each member, this allowed the group to gather ideas from different perspectives to collectively define the space for the theme.

During each round, we respected all group members to ensure their ideas were fairly shared without interruptions. When I came up with an idea, to ensure that my thought wasn't lost, we had two large butcher papers to jot down our ideas to share after the other person has finished sharing their idea.

After three rounds of world cafe, we were given an opportunity to vote for the best concept/idea

After the three rounds, I'm really inspired to further investigate the idea of "enhancing mundane spaces".

Further Research into "Enhancing Mundane Spaces"

In today's society, we are constantly surrounded by mundane spaces. An interpretation of mine at this stage is:

ordinary spaces and places that don't normally get a second glance and that are often overlooked by the world because of there mundane and ordinary status in the world.

Typically car parks, building entrances, loading bays, public open spaces, back streets and "Non Places/Spaces". I will be further looking into space both in a physical and abstract context.

Lessons Leant

From my experience after today's workshop and understanding thus far, World Cafe methodology fosters an environment that develops good conversations. I felt during the studio, this World Cafe approach is designed to get authentic dialogues started. This is in order to encourage the sharing of ideas in a relaxed, informal and creative atmosphere.

The card ideation method was a new and exciting approach to me. Our table came up with some fun ideas, although most of them were toilet-related due to the cards we drew.

However, I feel our creativity was limited by having to stick with the first cards until they had been exhausted. This issue became especially apparent when we were supposed to do the same task individually, where most of us had one or two weird words that didn't make sense in that context or cards that had words that didn't make much sense at all. Even though I am fond of ideation methods, I've noticed that in most subjects this far, we have not used any ideas after we came up with them. I believe this is for the simple reason that they are either not captivating enough as a concept or not feasible, making the ideation process somewhat wasteful. I'm hoping that this will not be the case for this subject.

In the end, we did decide to present the idea of a mechanical plant that would die as you are wasteful with water in your home; A simple but intriguing concept. This concept came to be when we ideated on the sentence "Design for enlighten in a bathroom using ridged with quality of detached". The idea is enlightening due to how it visually represents your water consumption with a familiar, easy to grasp metaphor, that of a plant dying, which equals bad. Although the plant isn't required to be in a bathroom, this is where the idea originated. The mechanical aspect of the plant came from the ridged requirement, and the plant itself can be picked up and moved around, hence fulfilling the detached requirement. We did continue to ideate on the concept with a new card reading semi-trailer instead of a bathroom, as we felt like we wanted to ideate something else than bathroom ideas, but eventually, after voting, ended up presenting the original idea to the class.

All images can be viewed here if not shown below.

Idea Explanation

Concept - SMART BEDROOM

Utilising the most recent AI and heat-mapping technology, it will allow the SMART BEDROOM to map emotions in the body.

The bedroom will respond to the human’s emotion accordingly. Responses by the AI incorporate all 5 senses to help better the emotion/situation.

CONTEXT OF USE: Retirement Home - BEDROOM

Motivation

In today’s society, there is a constant battle to help those who are battling with mental health, and in particular the emotions of the elderly and children. In today’s society, there is a contestant emphasis on ensuring the quality of life and healthy personal well-begin.

Emotions originate in the brain but can manifest as physical feelings throughout the body. Given the demographic, accessibility and university access is a major factor to consider. As a result, this does not require conscious human interaction, rather the AI will detect and action accordingly.

Affective computing is an essential part of current HCI. This technology allows for automated human affective behaviour recognition. This type of recognition is provided by means of the capture and analysis of implicit information about the user, such as vocal and facial changes, alterations of body movements and gestures, and so on. Recognition of affective behaviour is a part of effective interaction where a computer approaches the emotion, mood, attitude and personal preferences of the person. Adding the ability of emotional intelligence to computers makes them more coherent to the humans who interact with them. Light and colour are omnipresent environmental factors which influence the human being.

Light and colour are ubiquitous environmental factors which have an influence on the human being. Hence, light and colour issues have to be considered especially significant in HCI and fundamental in affective computing. Affective computing aims to integrate issues dealing with emotions and computers.

Inspiration

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Who am I?

My name is Marie Thoresen, I'm 26 (soon 27) and at my last semester of the master of interaction design program. After I graduate I aim to work with web design and graphic design since this is something that I've been passionate about for a long time.

What I hope to learn/achieve in PhysComp

Since this is my last semester I'm aiming to get better in areas that are connected with future employment. Programming is something that I've never been good at so this will be my main focus this semester. Especially programming languages who are related to web design would be a major plus.

I'm also looking forward to make something physical since I enjoy making things with my hands with various materials. If I had the time and money I would probably engage in more DIY projects so this course is a great excuse to do just that.

Lastly, I hope to achieve a good grade in this course and make something that I can add to my portfolio at the end of the semester.

Week 1 activities

The first week we spent getting to know the course and what to expect. I must admit that at first I was a bit sceptical as to if this course would be something that would peak my interest or not, but after the first two lectures I must say I got excited for what the coming weeks have in store.

After the first lecture we were tasked with reading a chapter in a paper. The chapter I was allocated was about ethics, privacy and security which is a bit funny since this is exactly what my thesis projects is about. Because of this I knew a lot about the topic from before which made it easy to join in on the discussion. I felt the discussion went fine, except that it was mostly just three who discussed while the other sat on their phones/computer and didn't contribute much.

In addition, we got to do some ideation for the main project by using a card deck and some notes which allocated different locations, design etc to those cards. This exercise turned out to be very difficult since there were many factors to consider and the different cards woulds always match one another.

The ideation went for three different round where, the first the group would come up with ideas together. In the second round we would come up with ideas alone and in the last we would change one idea from the first round.

These were the ideas I generated from the second round:

Design to embrace a ruin from different dimensions in an aggressive way

• Make life like scale of ancient ruins so people can interact with them however they like without the fear of permanent damage
• Idea above using holographic means instead of building materials
• Idea above only making the ruins as they were like before they became a ruin (from another time).
• Idea above using cameras or holographic to show the decay of the ruin from its prime to current standard
• A smaller scale remake of the ruin that shows the entirety from the bottom and up so people can see every single detail of the building process
• An invisible shield surrounding the ruin so people can interact with it as closely as possible without damaging it.

Design to embrace (in) a hot air balloon by sliding it in an aggressive way

• Instead of having the hot air balloon as a high-altitude device it can be used to get people from A to B by sliding it with a rope etc. that pulls it.
• Using a hot air balloon to surf
• Couple therapy air balloon where they won’t be allowed to slide down before they have resolved their dispute.
• Force people to hug by sliding the air balloon so they crash into each other. Blind dating air balloon.

On Friday morning I set aside some time to come up with ideas for my Project Inspiration Pitch. My approach was to use pen and paper so I could sketch if I needed to, but I mainly wrote down descriptions and justifications for my ideas.

In this session I came up with the smart wardrobe, an assistive shower cubicle, a desk chair, an annoying coffee cup, an improved steering wheel, and a conversation table. I feel like my ideas were mainly driven by the environment I was in when brainstorming, which was at home with a view of my desk, dining table and wardrobe. I don't drink coffee but there is a normality of being addicted to coffee in university and in the hobby groups I'm in. The steering wheel idea was likely from a culmination of my frustrations with morning traffic.

In the end, I chose to pitch the smart wardrobe because it has a lot of potential for cool features to implement and a good purpose.