World Café

This weeks first contact was organised as a world café. The previous week all of the different ideas had been put into themes and this week we would explore them even further. This was a fun exercise and gave the class a good opportunity to understand and develop ideas beyond what they already were. The first round was definitely easiest as everything was blank and it was up to the table to start each theme exploration. As time went by it became harder and harder to reset your mind for the new theme and catch up to what the previous groups had discovered. Also, since the butcher papers were rarely well organised it was difficult to read and understand what was what. By the last round some of the previous notes was so weird that my group had difficulty starting the discussions, so we decided to kind of start from scratch.

Because there were so many different tables and themes it was impossible to explore every theme that was available. I tried to have a quick overlook as I ran around finding out which table I wanted to sit by, but in the end I ended up just sitting somewhere I hadn't been before. The themes that I got time to explore were:

• Change through discomfort
• Enhanced mundane spaces
• Emotional totems
• Emotional intelligence
• Sassy tech
• Guided movement
• Body as controller

(Might have forgotten one or two)

In the break I got the chance to go to each table and look at the themes and their descriptions. In the end we were asked to choose three themes and arrange them from 1-3 of which one is the theme you want to work with the most and three is the least. After considering all of the themes(mostly those I had discussed) I chose these three:

1. Emotional intelligence
2. Change through discomfort
3. Sassy tech

All of the themes above gave me inspiration and was the easiest for me to contribute in the discussions since they almost immediately gave me new ideas. Overall, a good and productive day.

After the presentations, both on Tuesday and Wednesday, most students attended one of the inductions, whereas the rest stayed behind to sort the presented concepts into themes. Given that I had previously completed all my inductions, I attended both the Tuesday and Wednesday theme sorting sessions.

During these sessions, we used post-it notes to write down possible themes and what ideas could fit under that theme. I expected most of the categories we generated throughout this session, as some are repeated in other courses as well, such as Sustainability, Social, Health, Learning etc. See images of my post-it contributions for Tuesday here.

While some people kept on writing post-it notes and other people just stood around talking, a group of us started to put it all down on butcher’s papers. I took on the responsibility of writing down the themes that emerged when some of the other’s brought in the notes. We put the post-its down side-by-side and discussed which ones to combine to form broader themes to place on the paper. At the end of Tuesday’s session, we ended up with the themes: Emotion, Health, Learning, Change, Stress, Game, Music, Accessibility, Fitness, Physical, Negative Reinforcement, Smart, and Sustainability.

As for Wednesday, we started off doing the same as with Tuesday’s session, writing down themes that the new presentations could fit into. However, this time around, I tried to form more specific categories than the previous day, as we had to split up the broader themes to form more specific ones. After having done so, we started to collect the themes on butcher’s paper as we did the day before. This time around, I focused more on creating new themes rather than sorting through them on the butcher’s paper as I did the day before.

Following this, we started breaking apart broader themes to create even more specific categories. Here too, I took the job of writing on one of the boards. A couple of us discussed through the various themes from the butcher’s papers and how we could break them apart or make them more specific. The themes we ended up with was: Negative Reinforcement, Sustainable Visualisation, Negative Reinforcement for Behaviour Change, Supportive Fitness, Technolgy for Security, Bothersome Tech, Shadow as Input, Promoting Social Interaction, Social Awkwardness, Emotion as Input, Technology for Conative skills, and Centering Emotion. I believe the lecturer came up with the last one, Life Beautification.

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.