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.

Tuesday

In the meeting after the studio, my team mate and I decided that we are going to work on the project individually and focus on separate concepts. He is going to continue work on hand gestures and I will work on facial expressions and body language. We talked about how these separate concepts would work together and how it would still relate to the domain and problem space.

My Concept

For body language, I researched on different cartoon characters that are very expressive. I noticed a few recurring themes with these characters: Eyebrows, ears/antenna, body posture and glow/fire.

I also found a video that shows the eyebrows on a robot

With the feedback from the critiques and these cartoon characters as inspiration, I drew a few sketches for my concept.

Wednesday

In this workshop, we talked to the tutors about our concept. I showed my sketches and expressed that I was worried that my concept would be too cute to make people maintain a distance. However, they said it can be cute and scary at the same time and gave suggestions on how to do that. For example, scaring people when they least expect it or making the form be something that people normally avoid such as spiders.

Plan

• Choose a design from my sketches (Do testing to get feedback and opinions)
• Decide on a scare/shock tactic when people get too close. Ideas:
• Scary: Something like the Fiesty Pets toy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLQmnRWgjZc
• Shock: Jack in the box method, use springs, throw something towards people, spray water.
• Look at professional papers on the topic to do some background research.
• Complete proposal

In our team meeting, Friday of week four, we decided to pick up where we left off earlier in the week, by focusing on the rest of the feedback we received after our presentation. Moreover, we aimed to refine our concept idea further and come up with solutions to how we could split our project among our four team members.

Feedback

We summarised and condensed the feedback we had received to make it more actionable and easier to take into consideration when moving on with our project. There were a lot of interesting ideas to consider from what we received, such as how users themselves could input a mixture of emotions of their making, combined from for example clay or colours. Handing over control of the input parameters would allow for a more exciting approach which could potentially be more reflective of how complex emotions are. Moreover, it might feel better for users to have complete control over combining and creating a representation of their feelings at that given time. Another suggestion was to move to a household to ensure everyday use. Our original concept did lack a specific everyday use-case, which is why we especially took this suggestion to heart and which formed the basis of our pivot. A third suggestion was to have more complexity, as in increasing the number of emotions. This leads me to believe that either people weren't listening or that we were unable to get our message across as our intention was always to reach for such depth, but that our prototype would have to have certain limitations, which is why we talked about various ways of measuring the emotional intensity and which emotion users would pick. Another suggestion was to attain data that would tell us the connection between colour and emotions, which we also did mention in our pitch that we aimed to figure out in our initial user research. Others suggested making the installation a safe space where users would feel safe sharing their emotions, which is a important suggestion and one we will take into consideration moving forward. Some people suggested more collaborative interaction between people which we also have taken to heart in our pivot that I will talk of later in this post. Another suggestion was to explore shape and form together and how this could elevate a sense of certain emotions. Shape and form is something we are looking into that we haven't landed on as of yet, but we would very much like to explore how senses can be combined to emphasise emotions. The last types of suggestion were to have other types of emotional input such as heart rate, heat, and so on. Automatic inputs are something we are taking into consideration moving forward with our concept.

Pivot and Refinement

The rest of our meeting revolved around how we could pivot our project to be more of an everyday concept. We started talking about what type of experience we would like people to leave with and came up with four possible paths to pursue; individual and collective awareness, emotional release, spark discussion and improved communication skills. Which opted to figure out which ones to focus on specifically through user research. With that said, we did agree on the purpose of our concept to revolve around collective awareness plus a display of feelings outwards. This comes as a response to our feedback where people suggested more collective interactions, in addition to how we as humans share emotions daily would be a nice foundation to build upon in terms of making the concept more of everyday activity. As for target audience, we were all intrigued by exploring our concept in a multi-person household focused on student accommodation, given that isolation in COVID-19 times will likely have a significant impact on people living together. Towards the end of our meeting, we had gone through various types of inputs and outputs and how they could be applied to a household and landed on a vague concept that we wanted to pursue the next week. This concept was a cylinder with balls inside of it, where each ball correlates to each person in that household which shows that individuals emotions throughout the day. This came from some requirements we set for ourselves, that the concept should be easy to display and easy to access. We played around with input and output methods for the concept, but in the end, we did not land on one specific input or output. This will have to come during our next meeting.

This week we had our first online lecture which went better then I anticipated. It was of course not better than a real lecture, but it will do. As long as the course is not cancelled I'm happy to be honest.

Pitch

On Tuesday my group presented our concept for the class. We decided to record the presentation beforehand and just add it to the youtube list which I'm glad we did since it removed some of the nerves. I think the presentation went well and we got lots of useful feedback on slack. Mostly the feedback said we needed to include some interaction with the output of the concept, find a more specific target audience etc. As of right now the concept is not something definite and my group are still working on the details.

Group meeting

In order to go through the feedback and come up with some specific details around our project we had a group meeting on Friday over discord. We managed to go through all of the feedback and also decide on a target audience and what we wanted the end result of the project to be. Hopefully next week we will have the concept finalised so we can start writing the proposal.

Proposal Pitch

Our Pitch

We spent a lot of time working on our video, and at the time it seemed that we were explaining our idea well and covering everything we needed to. Based on feedback, as well as seeing other teams' pitches, it seems like we actually have a lot more work to do in refining our concept.

In terms of positive comments, a lot of people liked that our idea was creative and playful, and made use of everyday items, which made it affordable and available to most people. However, it was also pointed out that the concept as it was presented could become annoying over time, if the object made sounds every time it was used, and it would also annoy other people in the area. It was also made clear through comments that our ideas for the intended use were too open-ended, as we got some questions such as what was the point of the interaction, does it just create random sounds, are the sounds used in the video representative of the final intended product, and so on. It became pretty clear that we hadn't fully thought through our concept, and this pitch proposal was a good way to get feedback on the areas our concept was not yet addressing.

Based on the feedback we received, we spent the rest of the week researching and discussing specific contexts of use, and user groups we should target, as a way of narrowing down the intended goal of interaction. We ultimately decided to focus on objects that can be used to help educate primary school children in a classroom setting, as we felt this had a clear context and user group, while still having a wide range of possible directions to go in.

Other Pitches

I was really interested in the range of ideas that other teams came up with. Some seemed really well thought out, with lots of background research already done and a clear idea of the product, the context of use, and the intended users. It was a bit of a relief to also see other teams who, like us, hadn't thought through every aspect of their concept just yet, and still had important issues to address. I'm looking forward to the next studio sessions, where we'll hopefully get to see how some of the other teams have incorporated feedback and developed their ideas further.

Other Reflections

I've found the transition to online classes surprisingly much more difficult than I thought. In just one week I've learned that I actually lack a lot of self-discipline, especially if the pressure of being in a physical location at a certain time is removed. This is definitely a skill I will need to work on over the coming weeks, and hopefully by the end of it I will be able to say that this is another skill I've been able to learn this semester.

Teamwork

This week as a group we worked on our concept, iterating through the problem space and how the concept would solve this problem, then creating a storyboard and detailed explanation of the product, all of which was used in the presentation on Tuesday.

Problem Space

In the group my main focus was on developing the problem space, the main issue we feel 'Helping Hand' Will solve is a form of social distancing but devolved through wanting to be polite and not having to tell others what distance you wish to keep depending on your mood or what we called 'Social Activity' Listed below are three examples and thus the social distance they wish to keep from others. These might be a bit extreme however they get the general idea across. This problem space made it quite easy for us as a group to then develop the concept to better solve this problem, through gestures and motions used to keep others away (rude) or inviting them to come closer (nice).

Post Presetation

After the presentation there was numerous feedback, however the main concern was in the form of the concept, creating a robotic hand that creates complex gestures might be too hard to do, too heavy or creative that it attracts attention when the user wants to be left alone. This is where the group split into individual workers, to develop their own form they would like to work on, and what role that fulfills, personally I really like the emotion and 'sass' that body gestures can make, so why stop at a hand, I want to make a small moving mannequin that conveys these gestures of rudeness or being inviting, while being simple with maybe one joint per limb, making it easy to pull off, while the whole body can convey emotion better.

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

Emotional Birds

Looking back at our presentation, I believe we managed to cover a lot of information and give the audience a good sense of our concept. Our team started to go through the feedback after Tuesday's session and will continue to go through the rest in a separate meeting on Friday. From what we have seen so far, the concept fell short in the everyday aspect of the brief, which we will discuss in further detail on Friday's meeting. We have already looked into how the concept could be moved into a household, so it might very well be that we end up pivoting from our original concept during this week. There was also some feedback related to a lack of output interactivity. This is something we have to look further into as we believe too many features might take away from the core purpose of the concept and rather be a distraction. More features aren't always better. Moreover, I believe a concept could just as well focus on one place of interaction instead of splitting the focus between two places of interaction. With that said, we're going to discuss this in further detail on Friday's meeting and might end up with a different concept by the end of this week.

General Thoughts

I found that most presentations were, for the most part, within the requirements of the brief, with a few exceptions. Most concepts had minor issues only which I think is natural at this stage of the development as ideas are still rough and unrefined. However, there was a lot of potential and creativity in the various concepts pitched. My only concern is the feasibility of many of the presented ideas. It is nice to see the ambitions and dreams of a finished concept, but I do believe several teams will soon find it more difficult to create than what they initially assumed. Especially those who seek to measure emotions in one way or another. It is definitely going to be interesting to see how the various team will prototype their concepts and see the concepts evolve as we move forward in the course.

My feedback

Fire safety using audiometrics

Consider how it can be made accessible to the elderly given that the concept users AR technology. Some people might find it difficult to use and navigate through a phone screen.

Could probably be easier if used with AR glasses instead of a phone as it will react to body movement instead of having to point a device around.

In terms of immersion, I would argue that VR is a better option as AR lacks the same sense of depth. If that is important to the concept that is.

EMS – enhanced mundane spaces

You could consider AR to open up for multi-room play/inclusion.

Consider using different sound effects for each household tool and how they all could be different games that support one core gameplay.

Team Zoomista

Could you use a combination of a touch interface and body as a controller to make it even more interactive?

The Nagging Cushion

Will the user actually have to carry the pillow? This seems like an additional hurdle to overcome to use the pillow instead of just having a 'away from pillow' timer and general trust of users

Team Garfunkel

How will users be able to distinguish between which item makes what sounds. Given that music is a combination of several tones it would be nice to distinguish between various tones on sight, a connection between the sound and the physical item.

Team Twisted

Could this work with only one user? E.g., after having stopped on the yellow colour, you will have to move over the other colours to get to the apply pad. You should consider how people won’t mistakenly activate another colour when walking past other colours.

As a colour-vision impaired user, I would definitely enjoy having something that separates hue, saturation and lightness for me to help me understand what colour it 'actually' is given that many colours can look the same. E.g., use voice, text or icons to further distinguish colour combinations.

Also, as a colour-vision impaired user, I find HSL to be the most helpful way of learning and distinguishing colours.

Lome

Consider using the already developed voice assistant on various phones to be the sound input of your device given that some of these already use AI to understand language and tone. This could also provide users with a sense of control as they have to speak to the phone to activate when the device is actually listening in on conversations.

Ninja Run

Consider how you could use the physical space other than just horizontal block alignment to visualize what happens. E.g., could blocks be stacked on top of each other to visualize the number of times a loop runs?

Consider how you could teach other things too, such as HTML, CSS not only scripting languages or programming languages.

Helping Hand

Could it also help people get into social situations, not only shoo people away?

Bata Skwad

What is the connection between the problem space which talks of device sentience and the concept pitch presenting a maze robot?

How does a robot giving suggestions and ramming into your leg fix the problem of devices not working for you and people not trusting tech.

It sounds like the machine is focused on a really broad set of functionalities; can it be scoped down?

Mobody - Handy Aero 2020

It seems rather similar to leap motion. Could you make use of this existing technology and improve upon it to use other body parts as controllers in addition to hands?

Fitlody

It would be interesting to see if it could work both ways, as in the music adjusting to your actions and you having to exercise according to how the music and floor lights change.

Give me a beat saber version of fitlody.

Team Hedgehog

It could be interesting to have a visualization of your movements after the game finishes.

Could be interesting to use sound to navigate around in a dark room / maze.

Negative Nancies - Energy Saving

Maybe giving Emily ‘human or animal traits could help the users care about the messages it gives.

Half-ice no Sugar - ITSY

What will the various interactions do? E.g., what will an ear twist vs an arm tug mean, and how will this correlate to a specific learning outcome?

Output could be glowing patch, heat, buzzing.

Team Triangle

Is there a timeline where you can build the music sequences using these vials? It’s a nice and creative way of capturing, mixing and playing with music. How would sounds mix? Are there any controls to adjust the volume of each sound, when they enter and exit and so on?

Team 7

Could it be something else than a game or add it as a gamification on top of some mundane task to make it more of an everyday thing?

It would be interesting to explore how to teach people of danger signs, such as teaching users to sense dangers using electro haptic feedback.

Team CDI

Could the elevator take you to the wrong floor if you are performing the incorrect dance move? As in not stopping there for you to walk the rest of the floors but move one floor closer or further away for each successful or unsuccessful dance move.

Think about how dancing in the elevator may impact people who are uncomfortable in the elevator to begin with, that wouldn’t enjoy people jumping up or down.

concept: instead of elevator, use a horizontal escalator such as the ones at the airport. It could be a joined effort to make it move faster and would look like a neat line dance for everyone else watching.

Team Zookeeper

It would be more interesting if questions were difficult to choose between as in would you take a train vs a bus and what ramifications will the various choices have.

Could questions be based on activities in your home so that people become more aware of their choices?

Team Hi-distinction

Could you move away from the screen to make it less similar to consoles with motion sensing? Could boxing output some interesting artwork such as being interpreted as different hues and saturations to colour in an image and hitting certain areas to colour in that area?

Zoom discussion for the course

Due to the impact of COVID-19, this week was paused to leave time for the teaching team to convert the course to the online one. So, there was no contact session in this week, but in order to clarify the new content of this course and gather students’ opinions on how to better move this course online, Lorna scheduled a zoom meeting for the open discussion. During this session, we were provided with the chance to get to know more about how the remaining academic weeks of this course will be conducted. Also, we received some feedback from Lorna and tutors through asking questions and the chatting room in Zoom.

Team progress

In this week, our team first had an online meeting and kept the continuous discussion through our group chat. As we have assigned different roles and decided to present our initial concept through pre-recorded video, each team member made the PowerPoint slides of their part for the upcoming pitch session and recorded their videos. Due to the adjustment of the team project and assessments, we also discussed the initial plan about how we will move forward to the final delivery and how we will take the individual responsibilities for completing the project, but still work in a team manner. That means we could still work towards a same goal, but everyone has a clearer individual role.

Individual progress

Followed the instructions provided by the teaching team, we chose to present our idea through video, so in this week, I mainly made the slides for my designated parts of this pitch: Intended Experience & Operations (Body storming for demonstrating some interactions). For the first part, I made two new images to show the ‘bracelets’ and ‘multi-user mode’ aspects of our concept. In order to offer users the immersive interaction experience, we decided to add the ‘bracelet’ for users to receive the physical feedback (vibration) from the game.

In order to give audience a clearer picture of the interaction part of our concept, our team chose to use the ‘body storming’ method to show some aspects of the interaction. So, for my own parts, I recorded the PowerPoint slides and the body storming part respectively, and then I edited these two videos together to make it easier for our team leader to organise each one’s video.

Improvement

1. Compressing the image file size for better display in journal post.
2. Adding the alt text description of each image

The first session was the World Cafe, where we were presented the themes for the project based on the previous week's presentations, and spent time in groups discussing and exploring the themes further. Afterwards, we indicated which themes we were interested in working in for the rest of the project.

I generally enjoyed the World Cafe session, and I particularly liked getting to spend time with a lot of different people and hearing a lot of different viewpoints, but it was a bit confusing and frustrating at times. Because it was such an open-ended discussion prompt, it was sometimes difficult to focus the discussion on new areas and explore the theme beyond what had already been done. For example, I found that in some groups, people were very focused on building on the concepts from Week 2 that were presented as part of that theme, whereas I was more interested in looking at areas not covered by the concepts, and new ways of interpreting and looking at the theme.

Also, because of the structure and time constraints of the session, we all really only got to experience at most 5 or 6 themes, and when it came time to put our preferences out, I skipped over some themes simply because I didn't really know anything about them. It would have been nice to get some more time to explore more of the themes on offer.

Themes I Discussed:

Guided Movement

Musical Things

Enhancing Mundane Spaces

Change through Reward

Musical Metrics

In session 2 I was most nervous about finding out teams and who I would be working with for the rest of the semester. I was pretty happy that I got my first choice of theme, 'Musical Things', and I'm also pretty happy with my team. We are the only team of 5 in the studio, which worries me a little as there may be higher expectations around the amount of work we should be able to do because we have an extra person. I know 2 of my team quite well already, and the other 2 seem quiet and shy but willing to put in the effort, so I feel confident we will work well.

We spent our time in the session deciding on a more concrete concept to work on within the theme. We are the only team working in our theme, so we didn't have any restrictions or worries about overlap, but that almost made it more difficult to choose. We decided to focus on turning everyday objects into musical instruments, with the aim of engaging users who aren't necessarily musical themselves, to give them the experience of making music. We ran out of time in the session, so we posed 3 questions that we would each consider individually, then meet up in a group call later on the weekend to brainstorm and finalise our concept for presentation.

The three questions were:

• Which object we would focus on turning into a musical instrument
• What type of sounds it would make, e.g. musical, percussive, unexpected
• What kind of interactions users could do with the object

Our team had a ZOOM meeting on Monday to discuss our ideas and try and consolidate a concept for our pitch proposal. Our topic is creative learning and we decided to break down the topic into various educational themes. For example: music, learning, sports, brain training, motor skills, language, STEM etc. As a team we broke off over last weekend and started to brainstorm some of our own individual ideas for the topics to then bring back to the team.

During the meeting we had some very good discussions on various ideas, merging of some ideas and technologies to make a super concept. From the gathered brainstorm of ideas and inspirations we narrowed it down to two ideas: “Save the House” and “Deep Diving Simulator”. The fire safety concept was suggested as an essential skill, but knowledge of how to effectively put out fires is not always taught. The idea is an installation which teaches people how to safely put out fires depending on the type of fire. The idea is intended to be a fun experience and can implement a collaborative nature like the game overcooked, where a team must effectively communicate to out fires. Fires would be simulated using lighting systems, and the users would have a set of physical tools to help them put out fires. For this idea i suggested we could use auditory navigations to enhance the experience of the user and immerse them in a fire scenario. We all agreed it would be a great idea to create scenarios using our other senses than sight.

The deep diving simulator was suggested first as an educational tool to teach divers how to hold their breath before they begin diving. But then after some careful discussion and other topics about climate change and environmental issues coming up we thought this would be interesting to teach the general public about diving in the Great Barrier Reef but they don't actually have to dive there. This installation aims to be a diving simulator and aims to train one of the most crucial techniques of diving, breathing and a consistent heart rate. This could be used in conjunction with a VR headset to truly immerse the users in the underwater world. It would be a good thing for tourism and reducing footprint on the reef.

After much discussion we decided to go with the Fire Safety theme and try and flesh that out some more. Over the next week we are all tasked with doing some background research on fire safety, causes of fires, Statistics, Strategies of extinguishing fires, Previous installations or ways of spreading this information. We also want to look into possible technologies we could use for tracking, simulation and existing attempts.

Video Call - Bash

I enjoyed the video call from Britain as Bash had some excellent advice. Although I was already familiar with the information that he gave, having spent countless hours looking at employability before, I still enjoyed hearing about his story.

Team Formation

I wasn't too surprised with the team I received given that I tried to team up with people I know can do good work by putting my notes close to those I'd like to work with rather than the most exciting theme. This decision is a result of previous semesters where I've been in teams where a couple of us have to pull the weight of other group members. Given that I'm doing my thesis, I can't afford yet another semester where I have to spend enormous amounts of energy and time making up for the shortcomings in other people's work, as my thesis progress took a significant hit last semester. The negative aspect of this is that this team will have similar input to me given our same cultural backgrounds, whereas the positive side is that I know they can all do great work. I believe our group will be fully capable of producing a captivating concept and have a lot of fun while doing so. I hope that, in this course, we can focus on ideas that are more physical than digital as I'm interested in learning more than just web and app design.

The first thing our team did was to sit down and write up a team agreement, with one team member joining us on Discord. After the class, we decided to have a meeting to start ideation. There, we discussed the theme, emotional intelligence, and produced as many ideas as we could. We chose to focus on two aspects, input and output, whether they should be internal or external, physical or digital, and how they could be combined. After coming up with some initial ideas, we opted to plan a meeting for Friday to choose one concept to move forward. Previous to the meeting, we were all to come up with two additional ideas.

My Two Ideas

Thomas and I sat down to ideate a couple of ideas on a train ride back from a friends house. The first concept I ideated is a wristband that senses when you fidget with it, as one often can do when bored, making the device glow brighter to show your boredom and promoting human interaction. The second idea was the 'shrieking box', which you throw as hard as you can into the air. The further and faster it travels, the more loudly it shrieks, emphasising the emotions of the pitcher.

Friday's Meeting

After having presented and discussed our additional two ideas, we tried to look for combinations between them and the ones we came up with, in the previous ideation session. We chose to pursue the high-level concept of angry birds of emotions. This concept combines the emoji balls, different coloured balls with emoji faces to throw at people, from the first ideation session with a physical Angry Birds like game. We explored various input and output methods for the concept, amongst others, including sounds in the emoji balls from the shrieking box idea; Filling up different emoji balloons to visualise emotional output from the first ideation session, and many more. What we realised is that we have a lot of great ideas for input and output, and should conduct user interviews to narrow down to the best options.

After coming up with a concept to present, we started to put together the presentation and divided tasks amongst ourselves. Thomas and I were supposed to create a storyboard, Marie was to make illustrations, I was to make a visual theme for the presentation and Tuva put together most of the presentation. Moreover, we planned to have an additional meeting on Monday to finalise our presentation and rehearse ahead of the pitch on Tuesday, however, due to uni closing down a week, we postponed the meeting in case the format of the presentation would change.

Inspiration & Live Stream Presentation

Today we were very fortunate to have had Bash present to us live from the UK. He provided invaluable insights into the industry and this experiences thus far in his career and life. He shared some key point regarding employability, the importance and significant of this course, as well as life in the UK, interview questions and how to negotiate wages. Regarding employability, the major take away I received today was the importance to engage in a recruiter and growing a solid relationship with them. It is important for the recruiter to have a solid understanding of you so they can help position you in the best way possible. Also, he shared how an recruiter can help negotiate salary and have those awkward conversations on your behalf.

Bash also highlighted the importance of being unique. He had us conduct an activity whereby he had us write 50 words about us:

My name is...

I am a ...

I am unique because...

Then had us cut the paragraph down to 25 words, then 10 words, then only 5 words. He then asked us to share those and focus on those 5 words.

This was a very unique and interest exercise/experience. It provided me with an opportunity to reflect and provide added focus.

Team Formation

Today, we also found out about our teams. The lead up to the announcement was one of both anxiety and excitement.

I am proud to announce that our team comprises of three very like minded, diligent students. Collectively we are aiming high and will work very hard during the semester to achieve the best possible outcome.

In our team we have: Jen-Wei Sin, Rine Laegreid, Laura Pham and me and collectively as a unit we are excited to have embarked on this journey together and will continue to inspire each other to deliver!

Work Done & How it Relates

World Cafe

Round 1: Exploring the theme/domain

Round 2: Audience/Context

Round 3: Refining a concept

I should have taken more photos but from the top of my head, I was at Enhancing Mundane Spaces(also host), Musical Things, Creative Learning(also host), and Body as Controller. I think the tables that most excited me were Creative Learning and Enhancing Mundane Spaces because we came up with some really cool concepts.

One of the concepts was finding a way to make grocery shopping less boring and Mario-Kartifying the trolleys was proposed. Another concept was a 360 degree see-saw plaything which was adapting the Chroma concept to help children learn how to work as a team and achieve a specific colour. We played with the scale of it and exhausted the idea so moved onto refining another concept. We then looked at how Mort could be improved to not just teach morse code. I thought Mort might be a great personified grammar helper that would teach children proper grammar and sentence structure by instructing them to produce a sentence with a Subject, Verb, Object, or sayign a sentence and telling the user to pull a specific leg when the word is a Noun, Verb, etc.

In Musical Things, there was a lot of talk about showing music as more than just sound so having it as a vibration, visual effects, and having music as a community experience for all to enjoy and not just professionals. The main experience that influence my thoughts in this space was when I got out of high school (I was a band geek) and realised I couldn't join a band unless I was studying music professionally or doing the music courses at UQ as an elective (in addition to auditioning).

There were some really awesome discussions during the World Cafe and I liked that we could visualise the idea on the paper even if we couldn't find the words for what we had in mind. I noticed there were some rounds that were a bit quiet at the start but once we had a spark flowing it was very lively. The conversation dying down was a pretty good indicator that we could probably talk about a different concept or prompt-question.

At the end of the World Cafe, we put our preferences in and waited for the results of teams to be announced the next day. I put my preferences down as

1. Creative Learning
2. Enhancing Mundane Spaces
3. Musical Things

I know at the start of the semester I was keen to move away from the "educational" theme of my previous projects but I think I have to accept that I'll always be passionate about helping others realise that learning is enjoyable. There were also a few people in each theme that I was keen to work with and I didn't put my preferences down immediately because I wanted to kindof scope out who else was interested in the same themes as me.

Bash Isai - Guest Speaker

On Wednesday morning, Bash Isai zoomed in from London where it was 11pm there. He told us some really useful career/life advice about selling yourself as a very hire-able employee and being the one that can lessen the stress of the person hiring.

We completed an activity which involved describing ourselves in 50 words, then crossing them out gradually until it got down to one word. My word was analyse. I think it represents me best because I like to gather information before making decisions regardless of whether it's work-related or in daily life. I am the type of person that will watch 27484473 review videos of the thing I'm considering buying, and I tend to straight up ask my friends what they want for their birthday instead of taking the risk that they won't like what they get.

This activity was pretty useful because I did another video interview the day after and I was able to pivot my answers better as an employable candidate. Still scary and terrifying to do those recorded video interviews but I guess it only gets better with practice and over a long long period of time.

Team (Four)mation

Team allocations were released after the morning break and I ended up being in Team 4 with Nelson, Summer and Rhea with the theme of Creative Learning. We spent until lunch getting to know each other and writing up our team agreement. Our skills are spread out and I'm looking forward to working together to create something really cool. I said I was good at documentation and we all agreed that communication is really fundamental. It was helpful to talk about our past group experiences and the issues we faced in them, as well as discuss our work tendencies and productive periods in the day. We all like when goals are met and like to have the motivation and pressure of milestones and deadlines with the flexibility to change depending on circumstances and factors (which is where communication plays a vital role).

Lorna went through the methods and what we needed to do for next week, then we went off to lunch.

After the lunch break we finalised the terms of our team agreement and thought about possible concepts we could explore in the space of Creative Learning. I told them about my two ideas of Mort as a grammar/sentence structure buddy and Chroma as a 3D interactive seesaw thing. Summer had a really interesting take on the pressure feature of Chroma where students could have a pressure sensitive button that they could press to help the teacher understand how confused they are about the content in the classroom. If the student presses harder, they are more confused. It would reflect the cognitive pressure on the student without "outing" them to the class, thereby helping shy students who might not be brave enough to raise their hand and ask for help.

We also signed up to present 2nd on Tuesday. Our team name is still yet to be determined but we joked about keeping it as Team 4 or calling ourselves 3+1 (because it equals 4, and also because that's how many girls and guys we have).

Since there wasn't enough time to discuss all the concepts we wanted to, we set aside some work to think of some concepts and discuss them on Monday. I thought of an Art Abstraction concept where 3D shapes are magnetised and can produce "real life" images when the user combines the shapes and sees them through an AR lens. Initially this meeting on Monday was going to be on campus but Rhea suggested doing it remotely due to the CoVid-19 situation so we've got a Zoom link set up and our Google Document for the Idea Discussion.

Gluing my box together

I decided to grab Weldbond Universal Adhesive from Bunnings instead of braving the grounds of UQ Innovate to glue my box together. The main factors that contributed to this decision were my wariness for going to campus more than necessary and the non-toxic aspect of the glue. I did do some research into the best glues for acrylic, which mainly said acrylics require solvents to chemically bond the acrylic pieces together. For the purpose of this box, which is now nicely adorning the TV unit, I figured that the universal adhesive would be fine.

Work To Do

• Team Meeting (Monday 12PM through Zoom) to discuss concepts and finalise one for the concept proposal in class on Tuesday Session 1 (9:30)
• Team name! and charter (which is 98% complete, just needs signatures)
• Sketch/props to be gathered and brought
• Proposal & critiques of other team concepts

Work That Inspired Me

I first came across this designer through a documentary series on Netflix. Her work inspires me because she puts a lot of effort into making sure kids keep their creativity flowing and imagination growing. I like the way she thinks and how she doesn't just target a specific gender or way of thinking when she designs the toys.

We had a world café session this week before we form into a team. It was always exciting to have a discussion among different people in the class. I assumed most of us already know what world café is about; therefore, I will not explain it. During this session, I got to explore different themes where we use the posters' ideas and developed different contexts, users, scope, …etc. We had a total of 19 different themes, but I only got a chance to go 6 of them.

Ability-centric interaction

In this session, we started with identifying the theme and trying to understand what it is before we divided into two areas of what the ideas were and weren't. We went through all the posters and trying to get some ideas from it. It seems like most of them was focused on the vision-impaired or low vision people as a target audience(if I remembered it right). We tried to see if we can combine some of the ideas from the poster to generate new ideas out of it.

We came up with two ideas that they were somewhat similar in assisting vision-impaired people. The first one was having a bodysuit that could help the vision-impaired people to sense objects before they run it into it. The second one was having any surface covered with actuators; for example, it can be a table surface or a floor. It will help to carry an object to the user before they can reach it from far away. Time went out before we could elaborate and explore the ideas further. I felt it was quick before I could share more ideas on what we had. I noticed that when the table was silent and waiting for people who didn't speak to share. I would felt I need to say something to clear this silence; however, I ended up share something that I was not well-thought-out. People didn't understand what I was trying to say, so next time I should hold back and speak when my ideas were more plotted.

Guided Movement (Host)

I was a host in the third round of this section. Previous groups had broken down in section and given possible locations and some scenarios. For example, based on one of the posters (squat exercise, if I say the name right), they had an idea of having an exercise(game) in the public where people can interact and doing yoga together. Other ideas were navigation shoes and mechanical dogs, where people use the shoes as a GPS to guild them to the places they wanted to go. I elaborated a bit and trying to remove away from shoes and cellphones. I thought of a scene from a movie I saw that there was some sensor on the phone where they don't need to take the phone out. The road would appear direction to guild the user to the place they wanted to go. All the stores on the street will have a digital sign that appears in different colors to indicate a separate category of the stores. A light will blink to notify the user of the store that they are looking for. There were other good ideas our group has come up with, such as the shoe will guild the user to find healthy food after they finished working out in the gym. It saves trouble for the user to think and find healthy food to eat. The second one was instead of having a mechanical dog, the user could have a real pet(dog or cat) to do interactive exercise together in the pet park or at home. It helps both of them to do yoga and get healthy together. There are some more ideas that we also talked about, but I couldn't remember what it was.

Later in the second section, I explained what we had, and we narrow it down with what are the target users and giving more purpose to it. For example, a traveler(single or with a group) wants to have a consistent workout routine when they were traveling to a different country or area. However, later, I thought about if the user is living in a nice hotel, they usually have their gym for the customer to use. Nevertheless, it is just one side of the perspectives we look at in the limited time we had.

Technology with negative reinforcement

This theme was trying to get people to break up the bad habit by applying negative reinforcement. In the beginning, I didn't follow what other group member was talking about. The room was loud, and I couldn't hear what they were saying even though I was trying, but it was hard since they didn't speak up. I feel a bit left out, so I started to talk to a classmate who seated in front of me. We came up with our ideas by having an example right in front of us that people don't clean up after they finished eating. We have created ideas of how to punish people by having a bad dream after they go to bed, and all the trashes were chasing them. Or the smell will follow them if they don't clean up. We both had these crazy ideas. It was fun, but we don't know if it is possible to make it.

Altered Landscape

When I saw down the table, it was hard to understand what the previous group did. We didn't get clear information on what new ideas they had generated besides the ideas from the posters. We felt lost. I tried to bring some more ideas or asking what other ideas previous groups had. I was either being kind of rejected and pointed to the ideas, which was the same as the poster. It would be nice if people would want to twist and move away from existing ideas. Maybe everyone was tired after three rounds of discussions, and it was close to lunchtime. However, I was surprised that they used the post as an idea instead of just a reference. Even though it has lots of writings on the table, but it doesn't see going anywhere. People seem to stuck on sharing the picture and projected to the building, which was an original idea from one of the posters. Another one was people got minimized into a big world. In this around, I found it very hard to work with because it was behind, and we were supposed to think about the theme and be more specific rather than for self-amusement. A lacking purpose in why should we do it? What values are this design for? At that time, my mind couldn't think of any new ideas alone.

Digital sensation made physical

It was an interesting topic because senses are hard to cooperate with physical if we don't count touch, vision, and sound. Therefore, it is difficult to think and apply any technology into physical. At the table, we were discussing how to use technology to include smell and taste. We spent much time in this area and how to keep the smell lost longer. We didn't spend time thinking about what approaches we could take to make it physical. It was an interesting topic, which its also hard because I felt it was more internal feelings, not just what we know from the surface level. I will talk about it more in a different post.

Music Thing

It was the most enjoyable table I had on that day. People at the table were enthusiastic about creating fun music, and the ideas flow one after the other. It was a pleasant experience to be at the table with people who all enjoy and welling to participate. This time I learned to hold back and listen more before I speak. Based on the previously built concept, we created a sci-fi music player blocks with the string that has a base where each block has its tune. When the block stocks up, it produces high pitch and vice versa. If building the blocks in the x-axis, it creates long or short tones. We also thought about how to control the volume and make it more sci-fi. In the end, we came up with the concept of having the block building, representing skyscrapers, and the string is the base of the planet. When the music played, there would be laser striking the building as the alien invaded earth. The block would shoot up to the sky, and color would be painted behind its path to make a piece of art.

Enhanced Mundane Spaces

We started thinking about what we can do to make mundane space more fun. One idea we got was people have to dance in the elevator to get to the floor they want to go. We also had a few other ideas, but I couldn't remember the detail now. At the time, it was hard to come up with anything at the point of time. When I am thinking back now, it's funny that when we don't spend time thinking about mundane stuff. We could have millions of examples, but when we do spend time reviewing what's dull in our life. We couldn't think of any. Are we automatically eliminated what we thought is boring? And padding ourselves on the back by saying that life it all good.

What I got out from it...

It is my third experience of joining the activity. I found myself enjoyed more in this time around than past world cafés activity. I don't know if it is because I have more experience of how this activity works. Or I am keener to train my mind to think out of the box; I am not sure, but this is one of my goals in this class as I get so tired of trapping and stuck with my limited ideas. This activity helps me to learn from others and loosen up my mind without restriction. Yet, I still have a lot to learn. In some of the sections, I wish we could have more time because sometime I would need a bit of time to think before I shared my idea. But with the pressure of afraid others think that I didn't contribute. On the other hand, I would try to avoid to say ideas that were not fully established in my mind and caused people wouldn't understand what I was trying to say.

It was good to have an open-end topic to start a conversation, and having some supplementary references to get a head start on building new ideas was helpful. Nevertheless, it was hard to draw a line between either giving too much or too little information that might restrict our imagination. In some tables, that might be the case where people were confused or not sure what the task was. There were no new ideas produced, and people were relying on the references too much that cause them couldn't think of anything beyond what they have seemed.

I felt each turn around had a different experience, and it all depends on the people in that table. If people are more willing to participate and have some flight sky of ideas, it lights up the table, and the rest would follow. If people were less active, then it would be hard to carry on the conversation. But thinking from a different perspective, maybe the people who were less active because they were struggling to share with anything on the spot while others had more to say. Everyone has different ways of thought process, and it would be hard to tell by looking at the surface level.

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 Activity

Today we all participated in the world cafe activity. It looked at the various themes developed along with inspiration concepts attached to those themes. The first part of the exercise looked at sitting down at a table with a theme and discussing various aspects of the theme with the others at the table. I first sat at the table with musical things. I found this theme interesting because it took the physical interaction of playing an instrument and invoking it with another physical action. It was interesting to see that the inspirational concepts were divided into public and individual interactions. I quite like the boxing pad and the fountain idea. I thought this idea involved both exercise and music and that it an engaging activity to have. This idea could be a new fad or exercise regime which can encourage people to make music while working out, learning how to make music or workout to a beat.

This musical things concept could also be used in an educational situation. For children trying to refine their motor skills or learn about different sounds. The music box would be great for this as it had leavers which children could turn and create sound. It could also be gameified to ensure engagement.

Another theme I sat down at was the Ability-centric interactions I found this theme quite interesting. One of the ideas that came out of the Part 3 activity was a maze that the user has to go in blind (without the sense of sight) and navigate their way around the maze. The group I had also suggested obstacles and tasks the personal would have to complete without that particular sense. I found this would be an engaging physical interaction to have and can be used in so many different scenarios.

I found this world cafe activity very helpful in understanding and fleshing out the various themes I was interested in. By being able to talk to others asking their opinions on ideas, target audiences possible realisation for the idea to come to life was useful.

This week we did our presentations of generated concepts and critiqued others in a positive and constructive manner. These presented concepts will then be used in week 3 to further generate ideas which groups will use for their overall assessment. There were a lot of good ideas presented, with some standing out as distinctive, creative or disturbing (Smoking Baby, although it probably didn't even have to be named) with the those I liked the most being;

• The Handshake door lock, for being super creative and a simple idea that could be applied in many other scenarios or attached to other concepts
• Thinker Painting, using texture is a simple idea with 3D spaces, yet it is unexplored or could be a whole new way of working with touch that hasn't been used yet
• Mort. Using a smart stuffed toy to teach alone is a great idea, but morse code is applied so well to the toy too in a smart manner that made it charming and creative
• Naomi, turning the mundane everyday sounds you hear into music sounds both fun and creative and is something i'd be interested in doing

Written Critiques

See the concept poster here: actuated pixels

Actuated pixels' (AP) is inspired by the interactive, seemingly tangible holograms from Marvel's Iron Man and conceptualized based on the InForce project developed by the Tangible Media Lab.

An apparent issue with our modern-day everyday touch devices that many a sci-fi universe has solved is the ability to reach out to grasp and feel digital elements with our hands. Take the smartphone, for example. These devices can be drastically limiting to vision-impaired users as many of them are dependent on software such as text-to-speech, or similar, to use the phone.

AP creates physical elevations behind its digital counterpart, providing a sense of depth and various touch sensations based on the type of element that the user interacts with through hydraulics and electro-tactile feedback. Use cases could be as simple as braille text for the visually impaired to browse the internet, but even more interestingly, its application for navigational purposes.

Ed is vision impaired and reliant on his white cane to navigate. Ed was recently introduced to the new AP Phone and is excited to give it a go. Ed finds google maps by reading the braille text on his screen and immediately feels a map forming under his fingertips. He can sense the buildings on his left, the park and river on his right and the pavement he stands on. Ed notices an elevated wave moving towards him on the screen, realizing it's a person walking that the camera has translated into actuated feedback.

Using his phone to feel what others can see has provided Ed with valuable new opportunities. Now Ed can find bus departures by reading braille text and navigate there using elevated real-time maps, making his everyday activities much more accessible.

On Tuesday of week three, we went through an ideation method called World Cafe. This method included three rounds, the first being context, the second being different target audiences, and the third being refinement. Throughout this exercise, we had a chance to look at and re-evaluate the previously presented ideas, which at this point were introduced through the final themes, to spark new ideas. All themes were spread throughout the tables, one theme per table. After a certain amount of time, all but one person at that table moved to a different table to work on another theme while one person, the host, sat back to explain the previous discussion to the new people sitting down at the table. One person could not be a host on the same table more than once.

I believe there was some confusion throughout the tables on what the task was, given that over half the tables I visited had just listed keywords from the posters, summarised what they were about and never moved on from there to generate new ideas. Therefore, at some tables, it wasn't very easy to do the task in later rounds as we needed to catch up first. At these tables, I tried to facilitate a discussion and come up with quick ideas to race along so that we could catch up again. For most tables, this went fine; however, I found that there were always a couple of people that did not participate, even though I tried to include them in the discussion.

I forgot to take pictures throughout this session from all but one table, so the following ideas and reflection are based on memory alone.

Ability-centric Interaction (hosted)

First of all, we started off trying to define what the theme was about, so we began with writing down some points on what the theme is and what it isn't based on the posters. After that, we tried to see if we could combine some of the existing ideas from the posters to generate new applications or twists to the original ideas. Given that I hosted this table, I'm not 100% sure which idea came from the first or second round.

One of the ideas that came from the first round was a bodysuit that used actuators similar to those presented in two of the posters, Actuated Pixels and Mind Speaker. This suit would give vision-impaired people a layer of actuators that would both sense objects before the users would hit them and also soften the blow of hitting objects. It's an interesting spin on the original ideas and could be realised using a camera to sense objects and some soft material to soften the blow if the user hit an object. This would later be built on by twisting the suit to be used in a game where people would be blindfolded and use the suit in a dark maze to try to find their way out.

Another idea was to have an entire floor covered with actuators so that they could carry you or objects around in the room. A later design built on this by thinking the actuators could be used to lift people upstairs, similarly to how elevators work to enhance our everyday living room into a moldable 3D environment.

From the ideas generated, I would say I was most intrigued by the capabilities of a moldable 3D home which would be possible to simulate in a small scale model.

Body as Controller (hosted)

When I first sat at this table, we had to catch up as they were falling way behind, having just written down stuff about the posters and not continued to generate new ideas. I took the lead to bring the table up to speed and bring forth some ideation of new concepts to the table.

We started with animals as this was one of the subjects the last team had as a talking point. From this, we came up with a concept where you could play with your dog in a ball pit. Both you and your dog would have different sensors on you to differentiate between you and the dog. When 'swimming' around in the ball pit, all the balls the dog would hit would turn one colour, and the ones you hit would turn another. The person would be allowed to use his and the dog's body movement to create art in a fun and playful way, whereas for the dog it would be fun to have the power to turn on lights by touching balls and jump around in the ball pit. We discussed that this could be beneficial to have in an animal shelter for people to play with animals before choosing to adopt them, or just for people to come in and play with the animals.

Another concept was inspired by playing fetch with your dog. The idea was that currently the dog would sit and wait until you throw something that it will then fetch, but what if it could be made otherwise? We came up with the concept of a ball that you could pitch to the dog for it to fetch, but then the dog assumed control over the ball, steering it based on its movements.

Afterwards, when new participants arrived, we started to look further at the idea behind the Running Hand concept. We generated concepts where the game could be used to train fine-motor skills either for people with fine-motor problems, for children learning fine-motor skills for the first time or for certain professions that need to keep their hands exercised, such as surgeons. Moreover, we looked into how the concept could be used in a kitchen. This led to an idea which is best explained as fruit ninja for chefs. The design would translate hand gestures to determine how a machine cuts the food which is behind glass just in front of the chef. Given the recent coronavirus, someone mentioned that this could also be beneficial in terms of chefs not having to touch the food when making it, which could be a more hygienic way of handling food in the future.

Musical things

This discussion ended up being my all-time favourite, and our table had a blast ideating on this theme. We based our concept on what had been discussed previously by the people sat down before us, but we believe we brought the idea to new heights. What we were presented to was a music-making concept where blocks would be put on a grid pattern on the floor to make music. Each row on the grid determined what instrument was being played and they had discussed how to get a high or low pitch and long or short tones, but seemingly not landed on anything. We figured long versus short tones could be made with the number of cubes placed in the x-axis, whereas the pitch would be determined by the number of cubes placed on top of each other. We discussed several methods of adjusting volume, one being pressure plates around the grid for everyone to stand on, another being the proximity of people's hands to the cubes. In the end, we came up with using Hue and Saturation to determine what I think was the volume and what would be similar to how pedals on the piano would work. We discussed whether all cubes could be rubber ducks instead or small aliens with different aliens meaning different volumes. Moreover, we looked at how we could make it more sci-fi, so we came up with the concept of having the blocks you build the music with represent skyscrapers, the grid be the planet and when the music was played a laser would go over the cubes as they were being played. Also, we ideated that a history of that planet could be showcased as an alien invasion destroying the buildings as the song plays on and that we could shoot the cubes up as the song played. When the cubes were fired into the air, a streak of colour could be painted behind its trajectory, making it an art show.

Beautify the Self

This was also one of the tables that had fallen way behind in terms of idea generation.

We started to ideate off a jacket that could sense emotion and looked into how we could build on this. Some of the concepts that emerged were a jacket that would straighten up and give you a better posture when your posture was bad, or your mood was down. Other ideas involved a fabric that changes colour or text based on your mood and the mood of people in your vicinity with the same jacket and a jacket that would thank people as they were being friendly or gave you compliments. At this stage, we had reached the last round of the world cafe. Therefore we had to look at how it could be made feasible. We figured that reading emotions could be done through bend sensors for posture, heartbeat, AI analysis of language and body temperature amongst other methods.

Other

I also partook on the guided movement and digital sensations made physical tables. However, as I forgot to take photos of the butcher's papers, what our discussion revolved around on these tables elude me.