I've gone through the feedback (both Peer & Staff) and it gave me more perspective on features that could extend the concept and problems that it might face. For example, there is already technology that exists to show trying clothes on and standing in front of a mirror isn't very physically interactive. Maybe a way to improve this aspect would be to "humanise" the wardrobe so that the interaction isn't passive?

Another interesting point of view was that suggesting outfits might actually constrict creativity. Some people find joy in trying on outfits themselves and experimenting with that, so offering it as an option rather than a default might be more helpful if the concept was targeting a larger audience.

I think the core focus of the concept lies in its roots of slow fashion and sustainability. I didn't get to elaborate on how the wardrobe would count the number of times an item is worn in my pitch and I think this made my peers doubt whether the concept had a variety of novel interactions. Maybe voice and facial expressions would be better input to teach the wardrobe how the user feels about specific outfits or styles of clothing. If the wardrobe learns what materials and colours the user likes (using surveying and statistics) then it would be able to take that into consideration when reevaluating the user's wardrobe and suggesting which items could be donated and which items the user might want to wear after a while. I'm envisioning a situation of hangers having weight/motion sensors or the user's clothes having unique tags on them. Perhaps in a prototype it would just be barcodes or QR codes.

I think there is a lot of existing technology that would be able to prototype this concept really well since the sensor part of it could borrow tech from large scale department stores that have to keep track of inventory, but it still has a lot of potential to explore the unknown.

Hopefully in the world cafe activity tomorrow I can flesh out some more improvements not just on my own concept but on all the other ideas.

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.

Tuesday

We brainstormed what our fears, hopes, questions and expectations were in the first part of the day. My main concern that I contributed was cost of material and time constraints because not everyone can use the machines at the same time but we all have the same deadlines.

I forgot to put my expectations for the course in my previous post so I'll put it here instead because it's easier than editing my post and more transparent that way. I'm anticipating a lot of stress but also a lot of relief as well in terms of feeling like I'm ready to graduate and go out into the real world. I expect to encounter a few learning curves depending on the project I do. Especially if it involves woodworking, laser cutting and printing, but this also really excites me because I'm grateful that UQ has these facilities available for us to explore.

The other part of the day was focused on looking at examples of physical computing projects posted in the Slack channel and discussing why they might have been put as an example. We also tried looking for examples of our own. The example I posted was a wearable popcorn eating machine and I had the justification that while it was more of a set-and-forget type thing, it had the potential to be interesting if the hand only moved towards the person's mouth at a filler scene or during more loud bits where they don't have to pay close attention. It could listen and monitor the volume of the video or pre-process the video so it could forecast to the person a good time to take a bathroom break/get more popcorn etc.

Wednesday

HCI 7 Grand Challenges

The first part of the day involved discussing the readings of the HCI Seven Grand Challenges paper that we had to complete before class. I was assigned to Challenge 2 which was about Human-Environment Interactions and we split off into two tables to discuss our interpetations of the challenge we read, anything we'd like to add that wasn't in the challenge, and to come up with a short description. Photos of these can be found below:

Project Ideation

The next part of the day involved some really cool project ideation using a set of playing cards and a list of words where it would generate a sentence to prompt for design ideas. First round was group brainstorming, second round was individual ideation and the third round extended an idea from the table. We went with Lachlan's prompt and concept which can be seen in the 3rd picture.

I will be working on my project inspiration ideas tomorrow and I think my ideas tend to either lean towards being educational or environmentally conscious. This isn't necessarily a problem but I do think it would be cool to explore something more abstract. I'd like to step out of my comfort zone more and not limit myself to things I know already.

I went to the 78-207 Space Induction in the afternoon. Some people kept trailing in after 1pm and that was a bit frustrating because every time someone new came in, Ben would have to go and open the door and check that they had the right shoes and no food or drink, then Steven had to repeat what they missed. The rest of the induction went well though.