A1 part b

Technical Summary:

1. can we go over technical details?
2. the beam will just keep going all the time until it hits a door, and then it will bounce off?
3. *or hits a wall
4. so you have to co-ordinate chair sitting to open and close the right doors to get the beam to the exits
5. and use the gravity discs to curve the beam's trajectory?

Assignment 01b: Criteria

Must present:

1. Prototype Design: low-fidelity construction to allow exploration of physical interface. Consider process illustration by 'Lowgren'.
2. Storyboard of the interaction
3. Show the progress of the design ideas: how your design have changed and reflect why and how you've changed directions or rejected certain elements. Use this to support your design principles.
4. How will you evaluate your idea?
5. What design principles underlie your design? Use reference material from weekly readings/lectures
   

Jane's Assignment 1a Feedback:

1. Demonstrate potential workability
2. Show solution as visualized as holistic entity
3. Demonstrate solution functions as robust

Michael's Assignment 1a Feedback:

1. Group roles in the solution should be evident and clearly articulated and the presentation should be clear, concise and conforms to time limit. The group must show that they have clearly worked together, evidence of individual strengths exploited and presentation must appear rehearsed.
2. The solution demonstrates potential workability need to be carefully thought through and demonstrates both current and future feasibility
3. The solution should be visualised as a holistic entity whereby the design is thoughtful, it should connect the concept and rationale and has the potential for evolution.
4. The solution should demonstrate flaire and innovation by having fresh or involve an innovate application.

Week 04: Case Studies

Tangible Bits - Ishii

• passive
• actives
• queens
• backpacks
• robo-topobo
• remix

Design Philisophy

• accessible yet sophisicated
• robust
• meaningful even if power is turned off
• expressive
• engage multiple senses
• scalable

Jabberstamp - Ishii

Lecture 04: Tangible User Interface

Air Traffic Control system:

• Spend a lot of data & write a system - but scrapped and went to old system.

1. Reason 1: 2 years to get used to the system.
2. Reason 2: The way you interact with the system is too difficult/different.

• Old system:
• designed by traffic controllers
• physical/tangible objects to utilize
• visible
• entire system evolved - didn't have air ports before, only start to emerge after the air traffic controllers have developed a system.

• Focus on the work and setting of the work
• two roles of flight strips
• a representational role
• a coordinational role
• making work visible
• public availability of action over flight strips
• strips as a record of history
• work and the setting are intertwined
  

Ethnography - looking at how humans behave.
Social computing - people are remarkably sensitive to the behaviour of those around them, and make countless decisions that are shaped by their social context.

Design-focused social computing

• gathering field data and studying working settings - begin prototyping and see what works, what doesn't and why.
  
• Beyond single-user interfaces
• Participating
  

Tangible Computing

Social Computing

Assignment 01a Week 4 Presentation Scripts

Inspiration
Three primary cases that inspired our team for the Lullaby Project:-

1. William W. Gaver - Telegotchi
2. Shep Korvin - Weather Flower
3. Bill Gaver and Heather Martin - Worry Stone

Ultimately, these three distinctive project demonstrate different aspects in the field of tangible media and our team have closely examined each project's unique input/output systems to further develop our project Lullaby.

Telegotchi
Telegotchi is a version of the popular children’s toy (Tamagotchi) with no buttons (below). In the long run the goal would be to rely on psionic communication alone to keep the little virtual creature happy.

Our Lullaby follows such ambiguity of relationship by developing a toy, which responds to the player's audio inputs and react via tangible, audio and visual outputs. Our project's focus is not to rely on traditional keyboard or mouse input; instead we aim for a far more ambiguous input system similar to the ones demonstrated in Telegotchi. At this initial stage of our project development, our primary input system would focus on vocalisations.

These two project concepts share the same personal interaction between the device and the player. Furthermore there are emotional as well as tangible attachments in both devices.

Weather Flower
This project is an impressionistic display of a virtual weather flower. Similar to how real world flowers feed on water and dirt, virtual flowers, on the other hand, feed on climate data from a real world location. The data received affects the physical appearance of the flower.

The soft aesthetics of these sorts of displays seem well-suited for domestic environments; perhaps less demanding than more precise information, but it permits a degree of ambiguity that might encourage imagination and speculation.

An important fact to note is that this weather flower project is only a non-interactive ambiguous visual display; our project Lullaby is similar but instead of being just an ambiguous visual display, we are creating a tangible media that is aimed to be interactive between the device and the player.

Worry Stone
Worry Stone is basically an electronic to-do list that uses its processing power to endlessly and visibly rehearse entries. By taking on the fretting of the user, the intention is that it should free time for less neurotic activities. This proposal takes an appropriate use of digital technologies to perform tasks that are onerous for humans.

Our Lullaby toy demonstrates such potential - not to offload a player's worries but to stimulate player's emotions and allowing them to externalize their emotions. For instance, the player could display their true emotions in front of the Lullaby toy and the toy would respond accordingly. The player would obtain feedback if their attitude was too strong or too emotional - then they would be able to readjust their emotions before they encounter another human being. This also helps the player to let out their anger when, for example, they have to enter an important meeting.

Case from Bill Gaver and Heather Martin - Alternatives

Many people desire to understand and change their experience of their selves and the world around them. Nonetheless, designs might reflect them in ways that can be meaningful without beng solemn, externalising psychological mechanisms into digital technologies either to escape or encourage them.

From the Case - Worry Stone is basically an eletronic to-do list that uses its processing power to endlessly and visibly rehearse entries. By taking on the fretting of the user, the intention is that it should free time for less neurotic activities. This proposal takes an appropriate use of digital tehnologies to perform tasks that are onerous for humans.

The worry stone would be a device that allows people to externalise their cares so that they need not to dweel on them. Speaking into the device would ofload a task to a small database via speeh convertor. The user would scroll through the list, delete obsolete entries, or print out a 'to do' list.

But the primary function of the Worry Stone would be to take over the user's anxious fretting. To show that the device had truly internalised the user's concerns, its processing power would be dedicated to displaying the list of worries in random order, as quickly as possible. The user could let go of the problem for the moment, knowing that it was safely held in the Worry Stone's memory.

Our Lullaby toy demonstrates such potential - not to offload a user's worries but to stimulate user's emotions and allowing them to externalize their emotions. For instance, the user could display their true emotions in front of the Lullaby toy and the toy would respond accordingly. The user would obtain feed back as to their attitude was too strong or too emotion - then they would be able to readjust their emotions before they encounter another human being. This also helps the user to pertain their anger when they have to enter an important meeting.

Reference
Gaver, B. and Martin, H. 2000. Alternatives - Exploring Information Appliances through Conceptual Design Proposals. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 209 - 216. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/332040.332433 (Accessed August 03, 2007).

Case from Shep Korvin - Weather Flower

Impressionistic Displays - Weather Flower

Real world flowers feed on water and dirt... virtual flowers, on the other hand, feed on data!

Each "weather flower" is linked to a first-life geographic location. Whenever the flower feels "hungry", it links out to the internet and taps into an xml feed containing weather data for its real-life "home" location.

Like a real flower, the appearance of the weather flower is affected by the food it consumes. If it's a sunny day in real-life, the flower petals turn a deep red colour.... and as the temperature drops, the hues turn towards colder whites and blues. Similarly, the shape and texture of the flowerhead mutates according to prevailing weather conditions... so, for example, on a bright sunny day, the flower has an almost daisy-like appearance... during thunderstorms, the petals adopt a spikier, harsher look. There are 168 different "mutations" that the flower could take on, depending on the prevailing climate

The soft aesthetics of these sorts of displays seem well-suited for domestic environments. Perhaps les demanding than more precise information, which permits a degree of ambiguity that might encourage imagination and speculation.

Reference
Shep Korvin. 2006. Blog is the new black.
http://shep.typepad.com/shep_korvin/2006/09/weatherflower.html (Accessed August 03, 2007).