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 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.

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.

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.

Reflection

Today in the studio we undertook an activity whereby we grew existing inspirations to develop and share our own ideas. This process is called "World Cafe".

Personally as I reflect on Today's process, what makes such a seemingly simple practice — that of talking together about things that we set out during our studio 2 and developed and intentionally linking the essence of our conversations with students. Through our informal conversations, it offers us the opportunity to notice the possibilities for mutual insight, innovation, and action. I feel, through using this World Cafe methodology process, it offers a unique mixture of freedom and focus, of coherence without control.

Work Done

Today during World Cafe, we were able to experience and learn/ immerse our understanding of other ideas and general themes. This was another stage in the ideation process in which we undertook to seek inspiration to generate a brilliant idea.

Three rounds were involved whereby specific tasks/focus areas were explored. In the first 2 rounds, with each different concept/theme, I encouraged the group to define each of the words in the theme. This allowed the group to mutually understand and gather everyone's interpretation of the theme. Without restricting a specific idea on each member, this allowed the group to gather ideas from different perspectives to collectively define the space for the theme.

During each round, we respected all group members to ensure their ideas were fairly shared without interruptions. When I came up with an idea, to ensure that my thought wasn't lost, we had two large butcher papers to jot down our ideas to share after the other person has finished sharing their idea.

After three rounds of world cafe, we were given an opportunity to vote for the best concept/idea

After the three rounds, I'm really inspired to further investigate the idea of "enhancing mundane spaces".

Further Research into "Enhancing Mundane Spaces"

In today's society, we are constantly surrounded by mundane spaces. An interpretation of mine at this stage is:

ordinary spaces and places that don't normally get a second glance and that are often overlooked by the world because of there mundane and ordinary status in the world.

Typically car parks, building entrances, loading bays, public open spaces, back streets and "Non Places/Spaces". I will be further looking into space both in a physical and abstract context.

Lessons Leant

From my experience after today's workshop and understanding thus far, World Cafe methodology fosters an environment that develops good conversations. I felt during the studio, this World Cafe approach is designed to get authentic dialogues started. This is in order to encourage the sharing of ideas in a relaxed, informal and creative atmosphere.