In our team meeting, Friday of week four, we decided to pick up where we left off earlier in the week, by focusing on the rest of the feedback we received after our presentation. Moreover, we aimed to refine our concept idea further and come up with solutions to how we could split our project among our four team members.

Feedback

We summarised and condensed the feedback we had received to make it more actionable and easier to take into consideration when moving on with our project. There were a lot of interesting ideas to consider from what we received, such as how users themselves could input a mixture of emotions of their making, combined from for example clay or colours. Handing over control of the input parameters would allow for a more exciting approach which could potentially be more reflective of how complex emotions are. Moreover, it might feel better for users to have complete control over combining and creating a representation of their feelings at that given time. Another suggestion was to move to a household to ensure everyday use. Our original concept did lack a specific everyday use-case, which is why we especially took this suggestion to heart and which formed the basis of our pivot. A third suggestion was to have more complexity, as in increasing the number of emotions. This leads me to believe that either people weren't listening or that we were unable to get our message across as our intention was always to reach for such depth, but that our prototype would have to have certain limitations, which is why we talked about various ways of measuring the emotional intensity and which emotion users would pick. Another suggestion was to attain data that would tell us the connection between colour and emotions, which we also did mention in our pitch that we aimed to figure out in our initial user research. Others suggested making the installation a safe space where users would feel safe sharing their emotions, which is a important suggestion and one we will take into consideration moving forward. Some people suggested more collaborative interaction between people which we also have taken to heart in our pivot that I will talk of later in this post. Another suggestion was to explore shape and form together and how this could elevate a sense of certain emotions. Shape and form is something we are looking into that we haven't landed on as of yet, but we would very much like to explore how senses can be combined to emphasise emotions. The last types of suggestion were to have other types of emotional input such as heart rate, heat, and so on. Automatic inputs are something we are taking into consideration moving forward with our concept.

Pivot and Refinement

The rest of our meeting revolved around how we could pivot our project to be more of an everyday concept. We started talking about what type of experience we would like people to leave with and came up with four possible paths to pursue; individual and collective awareness, emotional release, spark discussion and improved communication skills. Which opted to figure out which ones to focus on specifically through user research. With that said, we did agree on the purpose of our concept to revolve around collective awareness plus a display of feelings outwards. This comes as a response to our feedback where people suggested more collective interactions, in addition to how we as humans share emotions daily would be a nice foundation to build upon in terms of making the concept more of everyday activity. As for target audience, we were all intrigued by exploring our concept in a multi-person household focused on student accommodation, given that isolation in COVID-19 times will likely have a significant impact on people living together. Towards the end of our meeting, we had gone through various types of inputs and outputs and how they could be applied to a household and landed on a vague concept that we wanted to pursue the next week. This concept was a cylinder with balls inside of it, where each ball correlates to each person in that household which shows that individuals emotions throughout the day. This came from some requirements we set for ourselves, that the concept should be easy to display and easy to access. We played around with input and output methods for the concept, but in the end, we did not land on one specific input or output. This will have to come during our next meeting.

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.

Team process:

Dur to the rapidly spreading of COVID-19, our team had an online meeting yesterday. During the meeting, we assigned different roles for next week’s pitch, and what should each team member be responsible for when preparing for that. We firstly broke the brief into different components, like design space, concept introduction, goals, contexts, intended experience, benefit, etc. By doing that, we were able to get a better understanding of the key things we should cover in the pitch. That enables each of us to know our responsibilities and contribute to and participate in the first part of team project.

Individual process:

As for the individual part, I was assigned the role to take charge of the ‘intended experience’ and ‘interactions’ parts in this pitch. So, I firstly wrote the script of these two parts, and then drew some sketches to demonstrate the ‘controller’ part of our concept. And also made an aircraft cardboard as the supporting material of body storming in the pitch.

Intended experience

There are mainly two aspects that we try to focus on. First, enabling users to directly control and manipulate the digital information in the game by just controlling their left and right hand in the physical world, so that to provide them with the immersive interactive experience. Another thing is that because the interaction is mainly composed of two parts, the left and right hand, so our system also supports single or multiple players modes by allowing a single user to use both hands as controllers, or one user controls weapons and another user controls aircraft. That means we intend to offer users a collective experience.

Operations

The left hand stands for the weapon part, and players can choose different weapons (or switch the levels of ‘attack’) by adjusting different finger gestures. For example, the thumb and index finger gesture correspond to ‘Normal Attack’; the thumb, index and middle finger gesture correspond to ‘Power Attack’; and the thumb and pinky finger gesture correspond to the ‘Ultimate Attack’.

The right hand stands for the aircraft part, and players can switch flying modes by adjusting the degree of closure between fingers. For example, if the user's fingers are all closed, then the aircraft is moving forward in the level 1 mode, where the flying speed is slowest, but the attack accuracy is highest. If the user's index, middle and ring fingers are closed while the thumb and pinky finger are open, then the aircraft is moving forward in the level 2 mode, where the flying speed and attack accuracy are moderate. Finally, if the user has all fingers open, then the aircraft is moving forward in the level 3 mode, where the flying speed is quickest, but the attack accuracy is the lowest.

Apart from that, users can also use their hand to control the movement and direction of the aircraft. Like if you move you right hand horizontally, then the aircraft will present the corresponding movement in the game, and if you tilt you hand to the left and right, the aircraft will also show the corresponding tilt.

Improvement

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