This week we had our first online lecture which went better then I anticipated. It was of course not better than a real lecture, but it will do. As long as the course is not cancelled I'm happy to be honest.

Pitch

On Tuesday my group presented our concept for the class. We decided to record the presentation beforehand and just add it to the youtube list which I'm glad we did since it removed some of the nerves. I think the presentation went well and we got lots of useful feedback on slack. Mostly the feedback said we needed to include some interaction with the output of the concept, find a more specific target audience etc. As of right now the concept is not something definite and my group are still working on the details.

Group meeting

In order to go through the feedback and come up with some specific details around our project we had a group meeting on Friday over discord. We managed to go through all of the feedback and also decide on a target audience and what we wanted the end result of the project to be. Hopefully next week we will have the concept finalised so we can start writing the proposal.

Our team had a ZOOM meeting on Monday to discuss our ideas and try and consolidate a concept for our pitch proposal. Our topic is creative learning and we decided to break down the topic into various educational themes. For example: music, learning, sports, brain training, motor skills, language, STEM etc. As a team we broke off over last weekend and started to brainstorm some of our own individual ideas for the topics to then bring back to the team.

During the meeting we had some very good discussions on various ideas, merging of some ideas and technologies to make a super concept. From the gathered brainstorm of ideas and inspirations we narrowed it down to two ideas: “Save the House” and “Deep Diving Simulator”. The fire safety concept was suggested as an essential skill, but knowledge of how to effectively put out fires is not always taught. The idea is an installation which teaches people how to safely put out fires depending on the type of fire. The idea is intended to be a fun experience and can implement a collaborative nature like the game overcooked, where a team must effectively communicate to out fires. Fires would be simulated using lighting systems, and the users would have a set of physical tools to help them put out fires. For this idea i suggested we could use auditory navigations to enhance the experience of the user and immerse them in a fire scenario. We all agreed it would be a great idea to create scenarios using our other senses than sight.

The deep diving simulator was suggested first as an educational tool to teach divers how to hold their breath before they begin diving. But then after some careful discussion and other topics about climate change and environmental issues coming up we thought this would be interesting to teach the general public about diving in the Great Barrier Reef but they don't actually have to dive there. This installation aims to be a diving simulator and aims to train one of the most crucial techniques of diving, breathing and a consistent heart rate. This could be used in conjunction with a VR headset to truly immerse the users in the underwater world. It would be a good thing for tourism and reducing footprint on the reef.

After much discussion we decided to go with the Fire Safety theme and try and flesh that out some more. Over the next week we are all tasked with doing some background research on fire safety, causes of fires, Statistics, Strategies of extinguishing fires, Previous installations or ways of spreading this information. We also want to look into possible technologies we could use for tracking, simulation and existing attempts.

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