Week 5

I had a rough week 5 because my accommodation kicked everyone out due to rising cases in COVID-19 in Queensland and for safety because of which I couldn't attend either the Tuesday's session or the Friday's session. I had informed my team about this and was trying to keep my communications as quick as possible. My team had communicated with me and had decided that we will be proceeding with the Option-2 for our team concept and individual prototype building part.

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Week 6

This week, I had to finish the team part and the individual part of our proposal report. We had decided that I will be doing the problem space/concept part of the report. I had started researching more about global warming and its cause. I was trying to think about what are the different things that we can use or we can inform children about global warming. I found out stuff such as plastic contributes to greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of its lifecycle, from its production to its refining and the way it is disposed of. Meaning that it's not only bad for the ocean and environment, it also contributes to global warming.

After the team part, I worked on the individual part of the report. I read all the feedback again. Kasey had copied all the feedback and put it on our google drive which made things a lot easier.

As we hadn't finalised any input method, my plan for the break is to come up with a system of input, and output response. A system which should be interactive and fun for children. Although it is easier to come up with the output method from the globe of our concept, I will look into different sensors that can be used as well.

Workshop - Analyse User Interviews

Between Tuesday and Thursday, we all did one user interview to gather some initial data to further move along our project. To start with, in the Thursday workshop, we summarised and analysed our interview findings. What we found was that people aren't very comfortable sharing emotions and when they do they prefer to do it face-to-face. Moreover, our users told us that they feel it helps to talk about their feelings. We also gathered some similar data on how our users perceive emotions and thoughts around emotional sharing. I feel we gathered some good data that would easily help us decide on the one concept we will pursue as well as an initial understanding of our target audience. Doing these interviews wasn't ideal given the current restrictions set in place due to COVID-19, but I feel we managed it nicely as we all live with other people that were in our target audience. One thing to consider though is that the people we live with won't provide a complete picture as the demographics are fairly limited. It's also going to be interesting to see how we can manage our way around these same restrictions when we have to test our prototype, but I'm confident that we will be able to perform some quality testing sessions when that time comes.

Based on this feedback we started to discuss some ways to change our focus and came up with some ideas that revolved around moving to a self-awareness focus, making it controversial, making it easier for people to talk or focus on the positive emotions. After a short discussion, we all figured we were most excited by exploring sharing positive emotions with others. This choice was made due to how our data told us that people don't really talk about their positive emotions and that they are not very comfortable sharing their negative emotions.

Around this time we got some guidance from Steven as we had some difficulty focusing our concept and getting down to the nitty-gritty details. Steven gave us some great advice which helped us immensely, which was to take a step back and look at what questions we are trying to answer. By now we had decided on wanting to focus on lifting the spirit in the home. Steven told us to focus on what we would like to achieve, as in, find a goal. He gave us some examples from his own experience that helped us understand what he meant with finding our goal.

After the meeting with Steven, we took a step back and went at our goal. We started off with "How can we lift the spirit in the home?" and went through a couple of iterations where we asked ourselves questions and tried to answer them with a new version of the goal. One example of this is how we asked ourselves "How can we help sharing positive emotions between homes?". We figured based on our data that people were most comfortable sharing with close friends and family that we should make it more personal or humanise the emotional sharing. This led to a new goal of "Help personalise emotional sharing and lift spirit of others when remote". We went through a couple of more iterations before we landed on something we were satisfied with that we all felt covered what we wanted to achieve. Our new goal at this point was "Encourage positive emotional sharing with close ones remotely". We had a short brainstorming session on new concepts that fell under this new goal before we decided to take a break and meet back after a couple of hours. We all agreed to write down some new questions based on our goal for when we got back and to create a concept with a rough sketch, a target audience and an intended experience.

Later that day, we all met back online and went over each of our questions and sketches. My questions were as follows:

• Can positive emotions be shared?
• Can positive emotions be shared in the form of memories, music, sounds, color, lights, haptic feedback, and or heat?
• Are positive emotions equally valuable when shared digitally?
• Can we encourage emotional sharing?
• Will positive emotions overshadow people’s need for feeling down?
• What does positive emotions look like for different people when shared?
• When do people want to share positive emotions?

These questions, in addition to the ones the other team members come up with are meant to be used throughout our development. Moreover, I presented a concept of a wearable that would encourage sharing memories with people you had experienced them with previously. This device would allow for recording information in various formats and had the intended experience of encouraging people to reflect and reminisce with close ones on the good memories you shared. Without going into too much detail the high-level concept is a wearable that when visiting places with memories from before, can ‘rewind’ and see, hear, feel a collection of those memories on your wearable device. Friends who was there will be notified as well that you are reliving that memory and can join in on it. After all ideas and questions had been presented we went over all of them and gave feedback to each other. Finally, we picked pieces from the concepts we liked and put them all into one final concept to present in our proposal. We divided the concept into two parts, one that we would like to present as our intended MVP and the other part as a future version where we would like to be in an ideal situation.

Before the meeting ended, we decided on some research topics we all were to explore further and divided the concept proposal amongst ourselves.

Over the Weekend

I got to write about and detail our goal and research question, which was nice as I got to take a look back and see how we got to where we were now and why we chose our path. Moreover, I found it useful to dissect our research question and define every bit of it and how it was all connected back to our domain of Emotional Intelligence. Like everyone else, I too found a peer-reviewed article to be used in our proposal. I found an article on how shared experienced regardless of communication is amplified, which to me were quite interesting. This article had some limitations for our purpose as it didn't explore if the same effect would be possible if people shared an experience remotely. Hopefully, through our prototypes, we will be able to provide an answer to this question. On Monday, I wrote the section on how our concept was relevant to the brief. Having already written about our research question I was quite confident on what our concept was and how it relates to the brief, so I had no real difficulty doing so. Lastly, before our meeting on Monday, Thomas and I went through the document and made grammar and content suggestions to improve what was already written.

Potential Methods of Inquiry

As for my own concept, where I'm looking into the interface response to incoming messages through coloured lights and how to play the recorded message, I'm focusing on post-prototype methods rather than pre-prototype methods. The reason for which I choose to not focus on pre-prototype methods is due to the team's initial research which covered enough for me to move forward with my prototype. With that said, I will, to the extent it is possible and ethical, do a combination of prototype tests with interviewing and observations. Where this approach is not feasible, I will instead focus on an online format trying to retrieve similar feedback. Moreover, given our restricted situation, I have considered conducting a heuristic walkthrough of the prototype using the other team members as experts, but this has yet to be decided in the upcoming weeks.

This week has been mostly focused on finalising the idea within the team. After receiving various forms of feedback from students, tutors and users we finally decided on a concept that I think everyone one the team was satisfied with. It has been a difficult process due to lack of inspiration and a theme that turned out to be more difficult to design for than anticipated but in the end we manage to come up with something that I personally is excited to work on.

My team had meetings on both Tuesday and Thursday and where we went through the feedback and finalised the idea. It was decided to work on the team section of the proposal over the weekend and be done by the team meeting on Monday at 3pm. Overall, I think the team has done some good work and everything seem promising for the future of the project.

Zoom workshop

This week we had our first zoom workshop which turned out to be a long team meeting instead. We received some feedback from the tutors which helped in our process to conclude what we would be working with. The online solution is still not the most ideal way to have a workshop since it basically requires good equipment from all part and a stable internett connection which I don't always have, but it'll do.

Going forward I'm exited to start prototyping and working with the project.

School had paused for a week due to the COVIN-19. I didn't know the pandemic would become so extreme to the point that we had to shelter in place. I have been quite emotional about what everything had happened, especially for the change to this course. I was totally looking forward to the exhibition at this end of this semester because I had heard lots of good things from the people who had taken the class. Also, I had seen the exhibition last year; it was so fun and amazing in the works they had done. I was so keen to make something cool and memorable to show in the exhibition. To have a formal exhibition outside of the campus was definitely an unforgettable experience. But I am sure this online class is going to be a unique and historical experience for everyone. Anyhow, I will put into the same effort that I committed for this class and make the best out of it.

This week's online class on Zoom was new, and it was interesting and fun that seeing everyone visually for a short time (before it crashed). We still manage to efficiently run the class, watch the presentation, critique others' work, and communicate. Thank you for the technology so that we could still run our classes due to the restriction we had. Overall, I think it was pretty good except on Tuesday the Zoom crushed in the second half of the class, but we still got the work done that is all matters.

Looking at other teams' presentations, I felt most of the concept was pretty well developed and fit into the requirement of their domain and the requirement from the brief to have open-ended and playful in everyday life. However, few were still need to develop it more within their domain and to move away from basic interaction.

Our team

We were happy that we finally got it done. The result was not as good as what I was expected because it missed out on an essential point that we forgot to include in our presentation. We forgot to mention in the skits or in the slide that the global color would change in the cumulative process approach rather than just based on the individual input. Therefore, from the feedback we got, people were missed understanding a little bit about our concept. It got pointed out in most of the critiques, which I was appreciated because I didn't realize until I see the critique. We totally forgot about adding it because it was our initial ideas when we conducted in our meeting.

Based on all the critique we had, here are some of the things that our team needs to look at: no binary option for asking the users about global warming, need to have a specific target user, a specific location for our activity. We are going to refine it more in our next meeting.

We had a quick chat after the presentation with some of my team members; one was not available due to some personal work. We all look at the critiques we got and pointed out some critical issues in our concept that we would need to address. Later we chatted with tutors and asked questions about how we could use different ways to ask the question without binary options? What specific target users could we possibly be the focus? Where should we have the activity? Is the interaction sufficient? I know it may sound like we didn't think through in our design process; however, we were at a point none of us could have any new ideas. We all that everyone was responsible for global warming since we all lived on the planet. It was too broad, and we need a concise user group. We glad that we talked with the tutors, and they provided some very useful information on how we can approach our project.

Using smoke, smell, water, and maybe use sound was still something that we would want to include in our project. Conversely, we would still need to do more research about it.

Individual process

I did some research for inspiration for our project. I want to see if I can find people who had done similar projects or installation, but instead, I found some images or illustrations. It was close to what we would want for our installation to be. It was fun when I was doing the research, and later I also made some sketches. Besides sketching and finding inspiration, I was also helping to put all the presentations together.

What's next?

Our team had a Zoom meeting on Friday and Sunday to talk first filled up some information with the member that was missing from the meeting after the presentation. We all go over again to address how we are going to have different ways of input. We were also looking at the team proposal paper together and discussing in each section to understand what we need to write and what information we would need to gather. At the end of the meeting on Friday, each of us needed to have 2 ideas about different ways of input and read two academic peer-reviewed papers before we had another meeting on Sunday.

On Sunday(today), we had a meeting at 3:30 pm, and we shared what we had found and the summary of the academic papers we read. We go over the paper again and start signing the job by section. Hopefully, we would have done a day before the due day and not last minutes again.

Here are the notes I took and some were from the academic paper:

What am I exploring?

I was not sure what individual work I would want to do earlier today because I felt smell, smoke/fog, and water were all so cool to make. I couldn't decide which one I want, as I am doing more research on how to make smoke and watching many videos on YouTube. I think I am keen to make smoke for my individual prototype. I figured that I could make fogs instead of smoke because they have a similar look of the effect. I know one is from water other is from fire. Maybe I could use fog to substitute from the smoke. I will ask the tutor again when we have our Zoom section on Tuesday. I hope I could do it; then I can start ordering supplies online so I can start working on it. Since I have never done it before, I want to have enough time to play around. While I was watching YouTube, I am so looking forward to building it.

Here are some of the links I found:

Mini Smoke Machine for Cosplay - YouTube

DIY Super Powerful Fog Machine under 10$ - YouTube