initial design

development after choosing initial concept

round table feedback

week 8 object workshop

This week in our workshop we focused on Emotional Design and how it will impact on how we design our products.

Last week we discussed that the three main dimensions of an object are Function, Form and Manufacture. This week we added Desirability to these dimensions because it can be really important for a products success that we desire to use it and we like to use it. It is more directly related to function and form however is has some links to manufacture as well. 

Arduino tilt sensors

Tilt Sensor

The tilt sensor is a component that can detect the tilting of an object. However it is only the equivalent to a pushbutton activated through a different physical mechanism. This type of sensor is the environmental-friendly version of a mercury-switch. It contains a metallic ball inside that will commute the two pins of the device from on to off and viceversa if the sensor reaches a certain angle.

The code example is exactly as the one we would use for a pushbutton but substituting this one with the tilt sensor. We use a pull-up resistor (thus use active-low to activate the pins) and connect the sensor to a digital input pin that we will read when needed.

The prototyping board has been populated with a 1K resitor to make the pull-up and the sensor itself. We have chosen the tilt sensor from Assemtech, which datasheet can be found here. The hardware was mounted and photographed by Anders Gran, the software comes from the basic Arduino examples.

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/TiltSensor

accelerometers

What is an accelerometer?
An accelerometer is an electromechanical device that will measure acceleration forces. These forces may be static, like the constant force of gravity pulling at your feet, or they could be dynamic - caused by moving or vibrating the accelerometer.

What are accelerometers useful for?
By measuring the amount of static acceleration due to gravity, you can find out the angle the device is tilted at with respect to the earth. By sensing the amount of dynamic acceleration, you can analyze the way the device is moving.
At first, measuring tilt and acceleration doesn't seem all that exciting. However, engineers have come up with many ways to make really useful products using them. 

KLEXL

More than a few parents have discovered that a few minutes of divided attention is all it takes for their tyke to blaze a graffiti burner across the living room wall. Junior's gotta express himself, so what to do? University of Wuppertal ID student Dario Jandrijic's KLEXL Interactive Paintingconcept is for a projector that allows digital wall painting by means of an IR tracking camera.

Light pens take the place of crayons, light pixels take the place of those Neo-Expressionist smears, and plugging this thing into the wall'd be a damn sight easier than laying down a tarp and rolling over your child's masterpiece. Plus you can presumably save the images, and reproject them years later when you want to humiliate your child, now in design school, for his poor sense of composition and line quality.

painters and painting

week 8 class discussions with group

Interactive Painting Club
- colour, emotion, movement, technique,
- what are they trying to tell each other? Their moods through technique.
- portraying colour via other means ie colour wheel

Public Art Project
Group of artists contribute to a public artwork. The artwork is a wall of movable tiles? that spin according to the movement of the brushes and colours spin according to what they are using.

Input from artists: colour and movement
Output at wall: moveable interactive wall (interesting public interest)

Input from public: touching colours and textures
Output: info about what colour and textures the public want (could provide inspiration to painters)

Between Friends Painting
- what are they saying to each other?
- what is the reaction to the person painting?
- can't critique when you can't see the painting
- how do you know that your friends are painting?
- how many are painting?
- where do they paint? what do they have around them?
- the blog can allow users to interact by seeing who was painting at the same time.

Group painting
- collective painting group.
- choose who you follow. change who you follow.  privacy settings

Input (from one person)
- recording speed/acceleration/deceleration
- possibly direction
- characteristics of the painter?
- how many are painting? wow, lots.

Output (many people into 1)
- music. predetermined? or chosen by each user? person choice could make it hard.
- movement
- light (how many people painting? intensity?)

Return Input
- I am acknowledging you painting.
- light

Objects used around painting:
- brushes
- pots
- palettes
- clothes
- easel
- chair
- desk
- jars
- clips

phillips experience lab

http://bcove.me/ynsizt8b

Super Cilia Skin

Links: Super Cilia Skin

Responsive surfaces

Sony has been exploring responsive surfaces that focus on the concept of how our presence is sensed.

Interesting video on this webpage:
http://www.sony.net/Fun/design/activity/concept/interaction/project04/index.html

gesture wars

Gestural communication is becoming a really important factor in Interaction Design as more products are relying on gestures, touch and movement in order to navigate and use them. This article by Don Norman on Core77 discusses how we much deeply understand how we use gestures in normal life and how that applies to how we use functions on a touch phone or a laptop track pad. This article is more geared towards  computers and smart phones but it captures what many designers are going to have to consider in the future.

http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/gesture_wars_20272.asp#more

article by David Malouf on interaction design

Foundations of Interaction Design

by David Malouf on 2007/08/23 | 

Somehow, products, services, and systems need to respond to stimuli created by human beings. Those responses need to be meaningful, clearly communicated, and, in many ways, provoke a persuasive and semi-predictable response. They need to behave.

This basic definition of Interaction Design (IxD) illustrates the common threads between definitions crafted by esteemed designers Dan Saffer¹ and Robert Reimann² as well as the Interaction Design Association³.
It’s also important to note that Interaction Design is distinct from the other design disciplines. It’s not Information Architecture, Industrial Design, or even User Experience Design. It also isn’t user interface design. Interaction design is not about form or even structure, but is more ephemeral—about why and when rather than about what and how.

For any design discipline to advance, it needs to form what are known as foundations or elements. The creation of such semantics encourages:

• better communication amongst peers
• creation of a sense of aesthetic
• better education tools
• exploration

week 7 object workshop

This week in class we split us for our parallel Object Scenario Behaviour workshops. Dharawan is the Behaviour person, Claire the Scenario and myself the Object person. 

In the Behaviour workshop we did some mind mapping exercises to explore our understanding and explore the different aspects of our design. Starting with three key subheadings including Form, Function and Manufacture we branched off these and filled in any possible influences we could think of. 

The mind map above shows the links between aspects of the design that influence each other. This is really important in order to understand what needs to be considered and it can also provide some limitations to the design and therefore may also give us a starting point. This was a little difficult to do whilst in class this week due to us not having decided on a specific scenario yet. However some things will be the same no matter what the scenario. 

so what?

This was the question that kept popping up this week. So what? 

After intial concepts Claire, Dharawan and I reevaluated each of our intial designs in order to settle on a design direction for the rest of the project. 

Dharawan's inital design was an interactive paintbrush...

Claire's was an interactive children's toy...

and mine was the miss you pillow...

To help decide on which design to move forward with, we looked at how they all fitted into the Object, Scenario and Behaviour dimensions. 

It was pointed out to us as we considered each design that we all had a different defining dimension to our designs. Claire's design appealed to the Scenario of the product and the story behind it. The Behaviour of Dharawan's was the prominent theme of her design. It was about how the product worked and how by its behaviour it demonstrated presence in the other persons home. Finally, my design was very focused on the feel and and physical properties of the product and how the person would interact with it. 

We felt after discussing the products that Dharawan's was a different and perhaps unique design that would be different to the other designs in the class. Also there are already designs that address the problems that Claire's and my designs addressed.