Review of Exhibition

After the exhibition I was quite relieved to be done with the physical aspect of this course as it had been a lot of work and effort to get to that point. Doing this course online through this pandemic was quite the experience but also quite fun to build and design a novel concept and take it to fruition. With all the building out of the way and only the Portfolio and Critical Reflection to go I am beginning to look back on the work done in the semester fondly and can see the things I learnt range from techniques and brainstorming to materials I will and won't use again.

The course was both useful and enjoyable and showed new ways of doing things I have done many times before in my degree, working in teams to brainstorm but then create your own concept only to come back into teams to work on the things that other people presented that you found most enjoyable was a new creation process that worked. While half my team left it was still achievable to create the product and concept between the two of us even with different forms as we both wanted to work on the 'Sassy Tech' which looked so fun to me from the start. With more time and effort i'm sure we could come up with a more silly and novel concept which gave Spud realistic hands to move or some other monstrosity, but with the allocated time I am happy with the final results and what I learned, despite the outcome of my final design.

Summary

With the failed product at the end it was more useful that it didn't work than if it did, giving an explanation of what I wanted to do and what actually was in front of me was useful to myself in seeing what my expectations were with this concept and I can see better where I went wrong and got lots of good feedback in those areas too. Despite the low number of visitors in the exhibition due to the online nature, those who we did talk to offered good insights from previous years or from other projects and showed me new ways I could have done what I attempted and offered great insights that I didn't think of before. Overall it was a great learning experience for building, testing and iteration that I think will be useful as I leave university and head into the job world.

- Cheers for the great semester Ben, Lorna, Steven, Clay and Alison :)

Tuesday

In the studio session we learned about how to conduct different types of fieldwork during a pandemic and how to use a Miro board.

Miro Board

This is what my team mate and I came up with. Additional information about our projects will be added in after we determine the details of our form.

Individual

My Project - Spud

Spud is a small robot that sits on the user's shoulder and uses its body language and facial expressions to show its sassy personality.

User Testing Ideas

From the background research I have done for the proposal, I got an idea of getting participants to show what body language they think is suitable for an emotion. Participants will be given a figurine/teddy bear to move its limbs to create body postures and paper cut outs of eyebrows to position it on its face to create different facial expressions.To find the best method of a shock factor, different methods of shocking participants will be used. For example, the Jack-in-the-box with springs, glowing red, showing teeth, etc.

All of these testing will be done with my housemates during the mid semester break so I can start building Spud as soon as possible.

Pitch

Process

In the one week break last week, my team and I met up and continued developing our ideas from the brainstorming session we did as a group in week 3. In week 3, we talked about giving a hand a personality and using it as a way to help people in their everyday life. We decided to focus our idea on the backpack hand that acts as a personal space manager.

We thought about other ways of giving the backpack hand personality and sassy-ness, which was really fun and funny. However, after having ideas that were going all over the place, we decided to think about a problem space first before continuing.

Problem Space -> People want appropriate social distances for their social activities, without having to tell others.

With this, we decided on two intended experiences, the personal space manager (our first idea) and the conversation stopper. We named our concept The Helping Hand.

Presentation

We decided to use google slides to present our concept. Each of us chose a section to present and did voice-overs. My part was the intended experience section as I was in charge in sketching the concept and the storyboard.

Feedback

Below are the some points from the critiques about The Helping Hand and my thoughts about it.

Size

• Too bulky, heavy
• Smaller = more portability
• Not convenient to move around

We added a backpack to our concept as we thought it would be easier to move the hand and its parts around. But I do agree that it is still very big and probably too heavy to walk around with it, especially in crowded areas (spaces where you would want to use it). My team and I talked about some ideas like attaching a smaller arm on a cap or a headband.

Gives the opposite effect

• Rude, Cultural differences (can maybe be solved by looking it as a separate entity)
• Strong personality, might scare people, make them feel awkward
• Draws attention. People might be interested in it and purposely interact with it.
• Distracting to user

As we wanted to make this arm seem as sassy as possible, I guess it may come off as rude and hurtful to some people. The tutors gave a good idea of making it appear as a separate entity so it would not be you being rude but the hand instead.

It drawing attention from other people could probably be solved by making it smaller or by changing its form to something simple/everyday so it can be more inconspicuous.

Other forms?

• Face on a display
• screen/lights/sounds
• Doesn't have to be an arm/body part
• Small creature
• Puppet

For this concept, we wanted to move away from using sounds (voice), lights or facial expressions to using gestures or body language instead. This would make it more novel and give it more sass. Lorna and the tutors gave good examples of other forms that we can think about instead of using body parts. As the team members would each be designing a prototype separately, we can each focus on a different type of form and see each form's benefits and disadvantages.

Points to Note for the Future

• Experiment on different forms
• Make it less noticeable to avoid drawing attention (blend in, simple looking, small size)
• Show that it is a separate entity
• Make it less bulky and heavy to be more portable

Looking back to the presentations, I would say that the general level of concepts pitched was superb. It was interesting to see all the different ideas people had come up with being presented, and I have to say that most of them were delivered understandably and comprehensively. Moreover, only a few, in my eyes, did not meet the criteria of being a novel, playful everyday interaction.

As for my presentation, I believe I was able to convey the concept both through the pitch, poster and blog entry. With that said, I would have liked to simplify the idea to more easily be able to communicate the concept given its complexity at the time I presented it. I did find it a bit confusing what the poster was supposed to include as the brief didn't specify it and there were some contradictions as to whether it should be a simple sketch or a fully-fledged poster, so I tried to go somewhere in the middle. I wouldn't change my idea much based on what I saw, but it would be nice to specify a use case to focus on as screens with touch functionality is a vast field.

Although many concepts were interesting, I didn't get much excited by anyone project as many were quite vague. If I were to pick a couple of ideas that I found most appealing, I would choose either Artificial Conscience, the smart wardrobe concept pitched on Tuesday, or the Chroma concept which teaches colour theory.

After all the concepts have been presented, we categories them under different themes. Next contact will do world cafe with these themes and form a group.

Critiques reflection

Some suggest to add sound/music to the BIBO light or make the light "breathing" maybe by making it glows when inhaling and dims when exhaling. Also, a suggestion to install a fan on it to make the whoosh sound. I think all these can be taken into consideration and experiment it later to see if they increase user experience.

A week passed by, we had clarification about how this course is going forward, and what we would be expected and do. Though, new concern rises when everyone was going to work together toward the end of the course. How it's going to manage with the tools and spaces? On the other hand, my curiosity increased when I was working on my poster. Thinking beyond current technology was fun and excited.

On that say, time management becomes a key that has been addressing in all past projects. I don't like to do anything in the last minutes. Sometimes, the brainstorming and ideas section took much time or rather in a rush; as a result, the product we had was not exciting and fun. Since we had more time in this class, I hope this would change with time constrain.

HCI: The Seven Grand Challenges

In our group, we assigned to Human-environment interactions. We started by breaking down and discuss over by small sections. Since we had a large group of people, we break into two groups. One of the classmates took notes, and the rest of us shared what we think and agreed. Below are the notes we had from our table, and the image of the two groups joined, in the end, to share what we found.

My ideas and thoughts:

In this section, one of the areas that I was worry about (maybe a little exaggerated) was how our world is going to take forward with the technology with AR/VR. Are the users be able to find the balance between the virtual world and the physical real world? For example, HoloLens helps users moving toward real virtuality; however, the users might become addicted to virtual worlds and over-relying to virtual agents. It reminds me of a Korean TV show called Memories of the Alhambra, I saw over the break, it's about a VR video game in AR setting. The physical reality is the game environment itself. It's similar to Pokemon GO, but the users would play the game once they put on the gaming contact lenses. It merges of playing and viewing the game in the real physical world. One odd thing from the people who don't play the game, they would think you might have a mental problem. Once the user started playing the game, they will have big gestures moving in the air or jumping in a space. Without revealing too much from the drama for people who are interested to watch it. I would end by saying that the main character, in the end, doesn't need the contact lenses to play the game because he, itself, is in the game already. Nevertheless, people thought he had some severe mental problems, but only he knows what happened to him, and only the people who played the game would understand.

Maybe in the future, we do not need only lenses to view VR/AR. Minimizes is always an aim for all the designers and technology inventor. It is so-called a sleek design.

One other thing I take away from our group discussion is that beyond using our senses in most of the current designs. Smell and taste have not yet developed. I am interested in how our future design would have accomplished in these areas. Since it's going to be a new challenge to pave the way towards involving, evolving, and evaluating methodologies and technologies, I would love to be part of it.

Ideation activity in the class

We have an exciting ideation activity in the second part of our class. I have never used this method before; we used the porker as a design thinking tool. At the beginning of the group work, it was a bit confusing since none of us had played it before. Everyone was trying to figure out how to play; however, we got a tough sentence. Everyone in the group was having a hard time to rephrase it. I gave tried to try to open up so that everyone could share what they think. But it didn't let the conversation going. In the end, with the tutor's help, we started to break down each word to generate more ideas.

Next, we worked on some concepts alone. I don't know why somehow I got stuck with the words I had. I couldn't think outside of the box. I struggled a bit of thinking I can only write all the words in a sentence. I don't know why I would think that. It limited myself to thinking anything beyond that "one sentence." Here are some of my notes.

First Day

We talked about our thoughts on what we would learn from the course, our aspirations, fears, rumors of the course and questions. What I was most worried about was us not being able to fully build what we designed for the project. But I was told that that is perfectly normal and that it was impossible to build it exactly the way you want it in a few weeks.

We then looked at projects that were done by students in previous years and went on to find projects that will inspire us for our own projects. I realised that there are many different directions that the project can go and therefore are endless possibilities of what we can design and build.

Second Day

7 HCI Grand Challenges

We had to read a grand challenge from the paper that we were assigned to before the class and then discuss in groups what we understood from it. My group first listed down all the important parts that we understood from each section and finally summarised everything in a short description.

Ideation

In the second part of the class, we did a very fun activity of using cards and words to form a sentence. I think it was a great way of forcing us to think outside the box as many of my sentences didn't make sense. This way, we could think of novel ideas and things that seem ridiculous.