Designing a design document

21-11

It was Jelmer’s birthday. I also picked up the design document, which is basically also a good start of the report, so I took the time to create some nice visuals for this as well. It became clear that I have still got some work to do about the theory of my concept. I made my own theory about the activation of the conscious mind. It is an easy theory, but nonetheless important. It says that when one performs an subconscious action consciously (turning on the light in this case) , this person will also think more about other unconscious actions (i.e. opening the door, taking a chair to sit on). There will probably be research about this subject, but I want to investigate this myself. Later on in the week I will develop a user test for this purpose.

The visual:

I’ve also been to my second academic development class, which still is interesting. As a preparation, we needed do read two articles. It kind of surprised me that the exact same things were being said in the lecture, it kind of felt as if I had read it for nothing. Of course, one remembers it better when he or she sees it two times. At this point, I have the feeling that it will be too hard to make the essay. It is about showing that a subject is or is not a pseudo-science. It is ‘merely’ looking at criteria and explaining why this science fits this criteria of science of why it does not.

Last week Friday: a normal work day

It started, as usual on Friday with a project meeting. We presented our development and future plans to Sam and he gave some good feedback on making the process and projects work. Our team has a problem in combining the different ideas into 'one concept'. It needs to fit with each other, which is a problem, as the concepts are not developed together or around a theme. In the afternoon we sat together with the projectmates and discussed the different concepts to make sure everybody understand the concepts and the contexts in which they could be placed. We did not immediately see how to combine the concepts, but we made a good start and have material to think about. It looks like this:

I have also had a individual meeting with Sam. In this he also addressed that I have to make some decisions regarding my concept. He likes it if I let him know more what I am doing/going to do. In the planning, it said that I was going to work on my showcase, because of the busy project with Rik, it totally slipped my mind. This is my task for the next meeting with Sam. He wants me to be less boring in my new showcase, as he thinks I have the skills to do some interesting things graphically. We also discussed a book (pattern recognition) which Sam was reading and he thought would be something interesting for me. It is about a trend watcher and how he predicts the trend by living the present ones. It reminded me of 'Transcendent man' about Kurzweil, who predicts the future of technology by making models of the old and present future.

At the end of the day, I wanted to get on paper how far the development of my concept was. I wanted to see where it can be developed further and where it is already (almost) finished. So I wrote down everything I knew (not everything is readable, but this is the only picture I have at the moment.).

Jelmer told be that the aesthetics are also something to look into deeper. This was quite obvious from this overview as well, so I made some sketches of how it could look. (still in progress though). As the bowl needs to be able to be shifted and I want people to be able to do it with one hand. This should be made visible in the aesthetics of the concept; how to hold it and how to place your hands should be clear when a user looks at it for the first time. As inspiration, I started to fiddle around with positioning the bowl.

Last week Thursday: Lustrumday

It was the lustrum day, the tenth anniversary of Industrial Design at the TU/e. I started, knowing that this day would not be the most productive. At twelve their was an presentation and photo of the department and free cake! At 18:00 there was the Bring your own Dinner-dinner, for which I still had to cook.

Even thought, I made another exploration. I wanted to look into other things people relate to conscious actions which can be associated with light. Therefore I made the exploration below. It showed me that it is really hard to think of a new interaction for my concept, without changing though behind it. I think that the shape of the concept is too unique in that sense to be 'replaced' by something else. I decided to keep the concept as it is and working it out more thoroughly; looking at the things which are missing and which can be left out.

Project continued! (Midterm Exhibition)

The SDL-weeks are over! Time to start where I stopped; the midterm. I will first discuss the last preparations of this before I start typing about this week.

My concept at this time was a bowl, which one could fill with water to enable the lighting in the room. This conscious action of switching the light on would be ideally causing people to think more about the (extraordinary) things which have become too normal. (i.e. switching on the light, getting water from the tap). In a coach meeting we discussed the possibilities to think of a very functional feature for the concept, not only being playful. When I started to think about this, I though of the possibility to be able to control the light with the same bowl. This is exactly what I included in the midterm. 

The midterm provided me with a challenge, how was I supposed to control the lighting in the room? Of course, I did not do this, but I did figure out a way to dim the light in the bowl itself. This also gives the entire object a mysterious look. Considering the little time I had left I choose look for a solution which allowed me to control some LED's with a potentiometer. The Arduino Libraries already have a standard code for this, so all I had to do is connecting and soldering the different parts. Some pictures of my creation here:

I explored the possibilities to get a good mixture to diffuse the light properly. The mixtures I used are water with milk, water with Brinta (porridge) and plain water. As you can see in the pictures below, the milk and water provides the nicest mystery and diffuses the best. I also experimented with a see-through bowl and a sandblasted one. In combination with the see-through bowl. this gave a really nice picture. 

The midterm itself is was okay, I did not get too much feedback which I could really use. I have the following list to look into. This is exactly where I started after the SDL weeks.

I first made a list in the program OneNote. Mariette mentioned this program, as Word was not doing what I wanted it to do. It gave me an easy way to paste text for conducting research and writing/drawing next to it (with a tablet). 

The list of feedback I wrote down was:

- Working with the properties of water (i.e. the turbulence of water is connected to the turbulence in the room.

- Look at magnetic fluids

- Look at the amount of water which needs to be poured into the bowl. How much does it need to be?

I wanted to explore new options, so I started to look at the magnetic fluids. How does it work, how well can they be influenced, how toxic are they? This turned into a really nice exploration I think, I have written down the references, looked/read them, looked at the theory and looked at options which lay close to it. The latter are combining sound with water and looking at non-Newtonian fluids. These are a mixture of Maizena (cornstarch) and water. If they have been mixed in the right ratio they are liquid when left alone, but solid when pounded on with a particular force. 

In the end, the OneNote document looked like you can see on the picture above, also with more details on the non-Newtonian fluids as well as the sound plus water underneath the ferrofluid (which can be seen there).

analysing frustration

Concept choosing day! Making the decisions which ideas have more potential is always hard, especially when having an opinion on them. This, again, was the reason to fall back on the QOC- analysis, something I learned in the UFP-Basics assignment. It is becoming a routine in my decision making process lately. As a start, I created 4 criteria. The first was the amount of playfulness, as this is the goal of the project. Secondly, the feasibility is an important factor at this point. I want to create the products of the concepts and test with them. Thirdly, I wondered how long people would be keep being interested in the interaction, as I want to have a connection to the process of creating with my concept. As the last criteria, I decided, at first, to go with 'How well does it fit the Atelier van Lieshout'. Later I changed into 'can it be used anywhere?'. The urge was that my final concept could be implemented in multiple places, not only the AVL.My goal was to cut down to two ideas.

This worked out great! After adding a multiplier of 2 to the first and second criteria, I had clear division in points. The 'Vision Tree' had 22 points, the 'Pursuing Light' 21, the 'Wishing Well' 18, the 'Leave your mark Wall' 30 and the 'Liquid Light' 29. As one can see, there are two ideas with the most points were the mark wall and the liquid light. So far, so good.

Now, cutting down from 2 to 1. This took me 5 hours... After setting up a pro's and con's list of both of the ideas, I saw potential in both of them. Talking to a lot of different people, gave me even more insights of the potential directions and possibilities. After I talked to about 10 people, about two thirds of them chose the liquid light idea. Eventually, after doubting for a while, I was convinced that this should be the one I had to chose. This idea is more creative then the other one and will help me a lot in my goal of user-testing this semester. As we say in Dutch: 'Duurt ff, maar dan heb je ook wat'