Spud

Spud is a small robot personal assistant/space manager that sits on the user's shoulder. It uses its face expressions and body language to convey its feelings and its sassy personality..

Modes

Depending on the mood of the user, Spud can switch between two modes: distancing others and befriending others. This helps the users in two different types of awkward and embarrassing situations like rejecting someone or trying to befriend them.

Testing

1. The first testing was done to find the best appearance of Spud. Participants were asked to choose their favorite sketch of Spud and give their opinion. The final sketch of Spud:
2. The second testing was done to find the suitable body language for different emotions. A stuffed toy was used as a model for the participants to position its arms, head and eyebrows to show different emotions.

Form

A simple prototype was built with cardboard to think about the look and the actual size of Spud and positioning of its technical parts inside.

I realized that Spud would be too small to hide all the parts inside so a bigger prototype will be built to showcase the functionality while a smaller prototype will be built to display the look and feel of Spud.

Work to be done

I will start working on the movement of the eyebrows, head and arms with servos. Research has to also be done to think about using cameras and facial recognition instead of the ultrasonic sensor.

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

World Cafe

This week we did lots of idea generation and concept creation in groups first in world cafe then in our allocated teams. World Cafe broke the class up into small teams seated at individual tables where the group would discuss and evaluate a theme, taken from the presentation ideas. At these tables the theme itself was evaluated and new ideas for this theme were created in a short period of time before the team split up and moved to new tables. At each table one member of the last team would stay to inform the newcomers or 'travelers' of what was discussed last session and to further discussion onto new topics.

Personally I went to tables that interested me, Musical Things, Sassy Tech and Wearable Tech. I would have liked to visit more tables and generate different Ideas however I was selected as the host multiple times as I seemed to grasp new concepts quickly and have a good way of describing them. After these sessions were done we then requested to join groups based off our favourite tables and concepts, mine being the ones above.

Meeting my Team

On the Wednesday of this week we found out our new teams based off our selected concepts and matching timetables, so I joined my team for Sassy Tech, with Lachlan, Zhijang and Shao. We all liked the idea of technology with a personality and worked on mentioning what our interpretations and expectations were, along with writing up a team charter. In the second half of the session, we found a basis for design, using the Hand from the Secret Handshake Lock, and putting it into different applications or to help in other ways.

Here are our inital sketches and ideas for the concept, where I drew lots of different robotic hands and gestures that could be made to give it personality and character. We also had lots of different ideas for the physical appearance of the hand, making it look realistic, or giving it unnerving qualities like extra fingers or multiple thumbs. This can be decided later, as the difference between a metal, flesh, green, extra fingers, elegant, manicured or hairy hand aren't as important as the role it plays and where it will be implemented. This sheet shown depicts some of the evaluation we did as a team to create ideas of where a hand could go, and we narrowed down some of the ideas for feasibility or practicality.

World Cafe

This Tuesday we did the world cafe activity where we went around to different tables with different themes and brainstormed about the context, the audience/domain and how we can refine the projects.

It was nice to see different opinions on topics and ideas that I would never have thought of. Through hosting, I found out that even if the first group of people thought that nothing could be added in an idea anymore, another group of people will come and have other interesting ideas to add to it. My favorite idea of a topic was for Musical Things. When I got to the table, there was already an idea of a mat with blocks on it that represents the pitch, volume and rhythm. We tried to upgrade the idea to make it different and more sci-fi. We changed the mat into an alien world landscape with the blocks that the user would stack as buildings. The music timeline indicator is an alien that would run through the buildings controlled by the user to play the song. This would be a nice way of composing music while designing a landscape and interacting with the music.

The topics that I was interested in after the world cafe were Sassy Tech, Musical Things and Creative Learning, which were my preferences for the team formation.

Group Formation

On Wednesday, I got in a team of my first choice - Sassy tech which I am really happy about. In our group, we looked at all the project inspirations related to our theme and the one that stood out the most was the Secret Handshake Lock idea. We thought about taking the arm, giving it a personality and putting it on other things. We also did brainstorming on places where we could attach an arm on.

We then went online to search on existing ideas of mechanical, robotic arms and I found a Youtube channel of a woman named Simone Gertz who is named "the queen of shitty robots". She puts weird robotic arms on things like the Plastic Hand Alarm that wakes you up by slapping you and the Iphone Arms that run away from you. I then got an idea of an arm that helps slaps people away and shoots water out of its fingertips if they got in your personal space.

A social robot that consists of a knife, app and "scanner" for use in the kitchen, to improve your cooking skills. An increasing amount of people have trouble learning to cook the later it is that they start[1], and this idea intends to be an intervention into that space.

Select your recipe, then simply go through it step-by-step until the meal is complete. As you progress through cutting things apart to use for cooking, an LED indicator on the knife, and the "face" (and speaker) on the scanner indicate if you're "doing it right".

The scanner and knife sensors record your actions. Afterward, you review what you've done against what was expected of you, on your smartphone. This pushes the cook to consider what they can improve on the next time they work on the same meal.

This concept focuses only on the aspect of cooking using the knife correctly (for now), and because there's a variety of ingredients one might cut, it wont be a single use tool, unlike the initial concept.

Project Inspiration

When previously volunteering at a homeless shelter, a common issue is that older volunteers need to teach new ones how to cook. This led me to the thought - surely there's apps and tools already developed to do just this?

Cooking Mama is a game game that teaches one how to cook. However, it only teaches the steps to take, and doesn't improve your physical dexterity and safety awareness with cooking tools.

Previously I stated the idea of "smart cooking tools doing everything for you" being something I wanted to avoid, I've found an example of one here. Sure, the Kuvings blender makes it extremely easy to cook and disassemble materials... but there's no room to make a mistake or chances to fail... it just feels like the blender replaces you.

At the same time, Peeqo inspired the scanner, with the idea of a small device that watches you and has reactions that can change how you act... it sasses you essentially.

With Rekaptured, the idea is that you go on cooking as you always have, and there's additions to your process that don't overwhelm you - and the opportunity for you to mess up your meal. You're collaborating with the tool to complete a somewhat complex task.

Initially the concept revolved around the knife talking to you. But cooking environments can be loud and chaotic, it was important that feedback had both a visual and audio indicator (angry and happy tones on scanner), and, that if there was talking, it could be ignored while cooking.

Feedback also needed to be able to be revisited later. In this case, if a mistake is made, the scanner and knife react, so the cook knows to check the app later to see what went wrong, and can reflect.

[1] (Background reading on learning to cook)

F. Lavelle et al, “Learning cooking skills at different ages: a cross-sectional study,” International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, vol. 13, no. 1, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-016-0446-y