reflectivejournalbymyy

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

ENRICHING THE POINT LIGHT EXPERIENCE WITHOUT COMPROMISING IT

INTRODUCTION

In most electronic devices today you can find simple indicators, they could be small point lights that inform you about the state of the system. The lights come in different colour intensities and arrangements but mostly in the same packaging, a small light with a plastic cover that you can use as it is or cover with different materials to enhance or change the appearance. They are there to give you information about the device, if it’s on or off, when a battery is charging or is fully charged, when something is wrong or working correctly etc. A point light is most of the time a small light emitting diode (LED), they are used because of their low energy consumption, small size and long lifespan. Harrison, C., Horstman, J., Hsieh, G., & Hudson, S. (2012) talks about reigniting our imagination when it comes to these lights, how they have been underestimated for their richness that can be extracted by working on the arrangements and patterns of the light. Is this something that we really want to do? Keeping it simple, universal and easily understable keeps the design from becoming interpretable. Throughout this essay I’m going to argue against their claim, I’ll unpack why and how these lights and their patterns can be interpreted differently based on certain factors. How we can work with lights in other ways to enrich the expressivity among them without confusing the user or observant. This will be done by using the insights gained from experiences in my own design work where we worked with only one pointlight and expressivity, and other papers. 

 LIGHT PATTERNS

In their paper, Harrison et al. show us 24 light patterns they have created that can be used for various things. 

 Figure 1:  Image Patterns.  source:  Harrison et al.(2012)

Some of these patterns are fairly similar and could easily be perceived differently depending on the observant. We can not with certainty say that these light patterns will be interpreted the same way by everyone. Our personalities, previous experiences, and knowledge differentiate from person to person. (Lenz et al., 2013) One person can look at the Twinkle for example, and imagine it looking like a candle burning which could evoke a calming feeling, while someone else with let’s say, anxiety could see this as something unsettling or unstable which could potentially increase their anxiety. I have recently been working on expressivity with constraints, the constraint in this case was that the only output source I was allowed to use was a one coloured LED-light. When showing our light patterns to peers they perceived the light as something completely different than we wished for. We were working with expressing calm-playful-aggressive behaviour but when this was presented our vision did not reach the crowd as intended. The calm state was a slow pulsing light pattern, the playful was a faster pulsing light pattern and the aggressive was something similar to the bright flash. (see Figure 1) Some saw the whole behaviuor as an increasing strain because of the accelerating pulse ending up in the bright flash. They saw it as a progression towards an outbreak, according to their perception this light was something negative, something to avoid. Other peers saw this as a positive progress, like a file transfer, something getting closer to the finish line.

 Harrison et al have, based on popular use today, come up with 11 states, these states were then put in 5 categories, notification, active, unable, low-energy state and turning on. A design team also created the 24 light patterns that were mentioned earlier by brainstorming and exploration. People, through a survey, chose what light pattern they thought fit best with each category. They argue for a richer and more expressive set to make the communication from device to human more effective and while they do act critically to their own work, they are not critical enough. They show the results in charts that are illustrated in the paper, on each chart the light patterns have received an overall score. Yes, there is always one pattern that has gotten the highest score, but there are also many patterns that follow shortly after, the top one isn’t as distinct as it should be. Even if there always is a “winner” for each category most of the light patterns never reach above 3 for an average score and the difference between the top rated one and the lowest rated isn’t always that big. What this tells us is that the people who participated in this study are not certain that there is one specific pattern that is optimal for a specific category. It could easily be two completely different ones. This is especially clear in the active and turning on category. They act critically to the unable category  because of its overall low score, it’s a hard category to get a feeling for because  it’s not a self-explanatory category and errors can often look the same as notifications, they are both attention seeking categories. Many of the patterns have, along with this, gotten similar scores in more than one category. From this we can see that for example, an equal amount of people have thought that Transmission Random Brightness could mean both that a device had received a notification and that it is turning on. (Harrison et al., 2012) This can easily cause confusion and irritation when using a device. 

 ENRICHING THE LED LIGHT

We have to remember that with the options that are regularly used today, there is a lot of information to get out. For example, the LED lights are available in different colours and with these we can send out messages about the state of the device. Designers are known to work with different colours to send out the appropriate message. They are called signal colours and an example of this is how red is interpreted as something wrong or something that is not ready yet. When the light is green though, it means that everything is okay or the system has started up and is ready to be used. A device that acts exactly like this is a sandwich grill. So think of all the colour options there are, if we then add pulsating, blinking or on/off we get a whole lot of messages to send out. On a router or a modem they often make use of this. There are lights that can change between colours and these different colours have different behaviours and meanings that tell you the state of the system. If it is starting up, if everything is working as it should or if there is something wrong. If someone would ask you right now what your modem looks like when everything is working correctly, would you remember it? Probably not, because it is something we just walk by everyday without thinking about until it doesn’t work and we have to actively go and investigate. However, when you look at the lights you will probably notice immediately if one of them is acting abnormal. It is such a simple little light, yet you notice as soon as something is wrong. What would happen if we were to add patterns then too. Like I mentioned before the light would then turn into something that is interpretable. A light that is constantly changing is also something that could potentially turn out to be too intrusive in your home. Our eyes are drawn to movement and with this constant stream of decreasing or increasing light shimmer it is too eye catching. With this universal language of colour and simple light patterns we can convey the messages we need, add to it a small icon and it’s very hard to misunderstand. 

 By adding other material to them you can notably change the look of the light. During our work process there were other groups working with the same instructions as well. All of us were in some way exploring the expressivity with just the one LED light. Unfortunately, I never tried this out myself but other peers started to make constructions around the light. One light could be surrounded by mirrors and have a completely different look than one surrounded by a thin paper material, creating a faded matte look. On the modem we previously mentioned the lights are very undressed and used as they are but you can change the perception of the light just by thinking of the placement. In some dishwashers you have an indicator light aimed towards the floor to tell you when a programming is running. This is placed in a way that isn’t intrusive but clear enough to send the message of a program currently running. Thinking of these things can change the perception of the light and by that get a richer experience of simple LED indicators.

CONCLUSION

When designing with indicator lights we have to keep in mind that people and cultures have different experiences in their past and therefore interpret things differently. By keeping a simple, universal light language and just working more with what we already have we can convey all the necessary messages that need to be sent to the observer or user. In their paper, Harrison et al try to develop a more complex light language by doing different light patterns to enrich the design field. In a survey they asked people to give each pattern a score on how well it fit the five categories they had assembled. The scores for the patterns and communication categories in their paper are far too even to declare it a clear-cut  solution. Instead of making the current communication more complicated and opening it up for interpretation we can work with how we are showing the simple language that we have today in various ways to enrich the experience. We can think of our colour choices and placement choices. Putting other materials and constructions to the light is another way to add to the richness. I’ve based these insights on design work I’ve executed and a second paper. When trying to create a more complex expression from a LED light, peers did not receive it like it was intended and misunderstood or got a different comprehension of it. The results of people's observations got concluded in opposite directions, which told me that this was not a clear way to evolve point lights. 

REFERENCES

Harrison, C., Horstman, J., Hsieh, G., & Hudson, S. E. (2012). Unlocking the expressivity of point lights. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, 1683–1692. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208296

Lenz, E., Diefenbach, S., & Hassenzahl, M. (2013). Exploring relationships between interaction attributes and experience. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, DPPI 2013, 126–135. https://doi.org/10.1145/2513506.2513520

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Show ‘n’ tell Module3

 Third week is over, it’s Friday which means Show and tell. First of, it was very nice to be in the group presenting before lunch. You did it the first thing in the morning and then you were done with it. There was no time to go around and build up the nervousness. I think this has been the most interesting module we’ve done. I like to get physical and get involved in the project and process myself. I’m going to go through some interesting points that were made during the other groups presentation and then I will get to our feedback and in the end I will wrap the course up as a whole.

INTERESTING POINTS ON OTHER PROJECTS

Like the previous show and tell people like to work with metaphors and sometime it work, but mostly it doesn’t because we have a  tendency to try imitate . I believe and what I understand from the critique it is better to have your work not be based on anything that already exists or make it related to something else. I’ve been trying to avoid calling the circles that we have been working on balls. As that makes a connection to activities, sport or other things that we don’t want to relate our work to. Many of us got a reminder to think about how it felt kinaesthetically since that is what the assignment was all about. I get a feeling that some of the groups actually thought about this a lot, but maybe have to think about how they present it more. We could have done that too, focus on the feeling we wanted to trigger and why it is interesting. Most presentations are about the process and what we have done, why we’ve made what we have, which is also interesting but we forget to include important parts sometimes. We are so caught up in all the work we are doing that we might have to go back to the brief and get a reminder that we need to focus on the feeling of the movements a little more. We had an interesting movement that we were working with but we didn’t really focus on how it made us feel or what it felt like to execute.

OUR FEEDBACK

If we start with the presentation we got good feedback for having a clear structure and had prepared. Since this assignment is about experiencing movements we used videos of when other people tried it and their first attempts mixed with videos where we show the sketches in our presentation. These first attempt videos are also what we used for our user testing earlier. We know what’s coming so we tried to have other people show the real experience. Even thought our topic is interesting it is quite narrow but we had done a good job regardless. We had somewhere missed to include the kinaesthetics here. How did these movements really feel and make us feel. What would we do if we had more time? Probably do the quick and easy tests to get a broader sense of the instinctive movements.

WRAP UP

This course has been really intense, both in work hours but also mentally but super interesting. I really enjoyed getting to work in three quick modules, it feels like we have gotten a lot done, learned a lot and experienced a lot. I like the show ‘n’ tell concept but maybe for these projects an exhibition would have been a better choice. Most of these projects were sketches were you needed to experience them to understand them. It is really fun to look back at the first module and compare it to the last, how much more we have gotten done and how the process have changed, also both in work hours and mentally. I have been more relaxed about trusting the process and believe that in the end, if we just keep working, something good will come out of it. 

Journaling wise I have been a catastrophe, I am writing some of it (this for example) in the true last minute. Like I mentioned in the previous post. This next course I will stay at school longer in the afternoon and have an assigned hour just for journaling, ‘cause if I remember correctly, we have a journal for the next course too. 

To make a one sentence conclusion, this course, along with Prototyping has been my favourite so far.

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Week 9 (26/10 - 30/10)

MONDAY

Unfortunately I wasn’t attending school or conducted any school work today due to some personal things happening. 

TUESDAY

First day of the week since I wasn’t here yesterday, We are starting a new sketch to try to evoke the movement of ducking. We have been talking about having a rectangle drop from the top of the canvas forcing you to duck in order to avoid it. If you failed the rectangle would turn red, again, to indicate that something is wrong. To this we want to add an annoying noise as well too see if sound can affect you movement to. Since none of us had been working with a sound library before it took some time to set up but with the help of another group that was merely with sound it started working. When the library was actually in the code and we could use it, it wasn’t too bad to just add the noise to the if statements if you touched the rectangle. 

What we noticed when trying this ourselves was that this wasn’t really affecting us at all. It could have been because it is our project and we knew what we were exploring but it just didn’t feel right. I gave the suggestion to have something shoot out from the edge of the screen instead and see if that was better. Coding wise these were not heavy sketches to make. We had all the basic movement from the earlier sketches so we just implemented the moving rectangle and had it shoot out from the left side of the canvas.

We just put people in front of this sketch without saying anything about what was going to happen and people actually started moving. This felt like a huge win. Maybe this is what we should have done earlier. Quick simple sketches to just see how we could get people to move based in instinct. We tried removing the video but with this we noticed that it just caused a feeling of non attachment so we put it back right away. Here you got more affected if you could see your surrounding space as if the rectangle was there with you. Unfortunately we have no more videos of this as we went around to as many as possible and did quick tests to see if it worked. In almost all tests the participant ducked from the moving object.

WEDNESDAY

Today was a fine tuning day and journal writing day. We spent most of the day just fine tuning the code, and the speed, size and location of the rectangle to make it feel smooth. We also added sound but in hindsight is was very unnecessary. It added nothing, no one ever managed to trigger it. The rest of the day we spent journaling and trying to catch up. I have been terrible at journaling this time and keep slacking behind a lot. I know it’s going to bite me in the behind when the deadline is closing up (edited  6/11: it sure did). I think it is because my partner is working nights and I usually leave school around 3pm to have a chance to see him for a bit before he leaves, and then I have a really hard time to focus at home. Next course if we have the journal I’m going to start staying until at least 5pm and spend the last hour on journaling only.

THURSDAY

It’s the last day before show ‘n’ tell and we have a lecture in the afternoon which means we have to focus before then to finish up the presentation. This time they have said that we have to be able to present on Zoom since there are a couple of student studying at a distance. I think it’s great to include them a little but more because I feel like they have missing out a bit by not being here. So we made a couple of last minute videos and started writing on what we are going to say. We are splitting it up evenly. I will start and then my partner comes in, I will come back, say some stuff in the middle and then he will finish it off. I like this because I have been last in the two previous presentations so it’s a nice change. We made sure to have everything that we are showing on video for it to not take up too much of our time, and then there is no chance of a live showing to fail. I will add my notes, if that’s interesting, I have no idea. But I don’t have that much to write about today.

I had a hard time to follow along in the lecture because I was setting up the powerpoint and also finishing up what I needed to say. But they talked about AI and how it can never get a full understanding of the world like we humans have. He compared AI to birds. I there was suddenly a plane crash we would see that something has happened here and this is not normal. A bird would just land on the plane having no thought of anything being out of the ordinary.

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Week 8 (19/10 - 23/10)

MONDAY:

Monday is here which means back to work! We went through the two sketches we made last week, tried them both and then started discussing what we liked and disliked with them. My group partner made a sketch with a ball that you can move around with a body part, we’ve tried it with both our hands and our nose. It was based on the concept of the user having control over what is happening on the screen. We can call my sketch Improv and my partners sketch Ball.

Ball:

The interaction is quite flat, you move the ball around for a couple of seconds and then you’re done with it, similar to my sketch last week before adding another body part. There is nothing going if you’re not there either, it doesn’t act like a living thing. The interaction between the ball and the wrist is very fluent and it feels like the ball is really reacting to you. 

Improv:

There is more to do, it changes quickly and a lot. One time is not like the other and it’s constantly ongoing wether you’re there or not. As you enter its presence all you can do is adjust to its behaviour. 

We were pretty much in agreement that the forced movement was the more interesting one. We felt that there was more explore and build on.

We started discussing what we could do to make it feel different or change the felt experience. We tried to remove the video and have a one coloured background to see what would change in the experience. 

It actually made you feel less connected to the screen, but at the same time it made you think of you how it felt more. When I couldn’t see myself anymore I didn’t have to think of how I looked on the screen, it removed the silly feeling a little bit. We tried this but didn’t really know what to do with it, where to move next.  

Conveniently our teacher sat down for a coaching session at this time. We talked about what we had done so far and showed him the sketches. We continued talking about what different kind of forced movements there are and he asked what kind we were thinking of working with, we had no idea. At this moment he did a quick exhibition, he grabbed something that was laying on the table and threw it lightly at my group mate who instinctively caught it. This caught my mind immediately, what if we worked with involuntary or instinctive movements? So what is an instinctive movement and what kind instinctive movements are there?

Instinct = An intuitive reaction not based on rational conscious thought

Movements:

- Catch.

- Protecting yourself if something is being thrown at you for example.

- Moving stuff when walking by / moving yourself out of the way

- Ducking

TUESDAY:

Discussing yesterday, starting with two new sketches based on discussion. Axel with a ball that gets smaller and bigger that you are supposed to adapt to. Me with a ball that you have to catch that randomly turns smaller and falls through your hands making you drop it and move in an instinctive way to catch it again. 

Today we are working from home because we’re waiting for a relatives Covid-19 results to se if one of us could potentially be infected. From the thoughts and observations yesterday we were working on two completely new sketches based on instinct or involuntary movement.

My partner is making a sketch where a circle is changing between a small and bigger size and you are supposed to adapt to the size as well. When the circle is big, you become bigger and when it’s small you have to be smaller. By smaller and bigger we mean the distance between you wrists. If you are not outside or inside its borders the circle with turn red, indicating that something is wrong. I think the idea here is to trigger the tense state where you waiting for a change and having to adapt to it.

. I am working with a circle that comes falling from the top of the screen. I want to see if this can evoke the instinctive movement in my peers if I put it in front of them. When you think you’ve caught it and is holding on to it, it’s going to become smaller, hopefully falling between your hands to once again, evoke that catching movement that you exercise from you instinct.  Here it is shown without the video, you can only see your wrist position from the red small circles.

Tomorrow we want to maybe implement sound, see if that causes a bigger reaction than when its just quiet. Maybe implement these into each other. Use the first one where you have to adapt to the size of the circle as a distraction before the circle starts falling. If we finish and have the time do some user testing and see what happens.

WEDNESDAY:

Today has been such a pain in my a**, we have been working the entire day with just combining our sketches from yesterday. In the end we had a little time to try it with others and see how they reacted to it.

We are back at the school, everyone is healthy and Corona-free. Today was not a struggle free day. I’ve been in such a bad mood the entire day and nothing has been working as we want to. We have gotten errors after errors. We have spent HOURS getting a timer to work, I feel like I’m back in module 2 with all these struggles. My partner is luckily quite skilled with programming and together with my googling and him trying it out we eventually made it work. It really took most of the day. Days like this I wish we could just tell a programmer how we wanted it to work, they’d fix it and we could focus on the actual interaction. It feels like we’ve spent an unreasonable time on this. Our vision is that it starts with the circle that is changing size and you get a specified time limit to adapt to the size changes that will happen in a random time interval. If you fail the circle with start falling and then evoke that instinctual movement. At the end of the day we managed to get it to work somewhat, we started a timer when the program had started up and when the circle then changed size we always check what the timer is at now and give the participant a 2-second time limit to adapt and it’s working, FINALLY! We had a couple of minute over and wanted to get an idea of what people would do when out in front of it, we didn’t tell them much about what to do either. Comments we got from this was:

- It’s a little hard to grasp what to do at first, when it shifted in size. The feeling of being tense is there.

- People actually did grab for the circle when it started falling when they failed. Unfortunately we didn’t film it and don’t have any video documentation of it.

THURSDAY:

It’s almost weekend but we still have a little further to go! Today we continued and started fine tuning the sketch from yesterday. The circle has been too easy to catch as it is moving quite slowly, we have also been playing with the sizes of the circles to try to get them in appropriate sizes. 

I am still a bit that so much of yesterday was spent on just cramming programming. In a working environment I have assumed that we will be working with developers who will be in charge of the coding. We don’t get the time to focus on the interaction as much as we want to when every small change takes up so much of our time. I get that it is great that we know a bit of programming to get a better sense of what is possible. But until someones is very proficient in programming, it’s always going to be hard to imagine all the possibilities. I think my programming logic is fine, I know sort of how to think when putting stuff together or adding behaviour. But when I have to cram down all the functional stuff and I have to get information from here and send it over there and so on, I am lost! 

Enough with the ranting, we had a quick chat with the teacher about the sketch we’ve produced and received some things to think about during the process. How are we trying to evoke the emotions right now and how can we increase them? By adding more new features or have more of the same features that we aldready have? When we add or remove things, remember to think about how this is adding to the experience we’re exploring. We also have to remember that these sketches are not about being fun, but about exploring the kinaesthetic movements of it. What many groups have heard before, and what I want to watch out for is making game-like sketches or simulations. We also got some idea about thinking of distractions so we will try this out as well. We will try to shift body parts that you are supposed to adapt the circle to. Instead of doing it with your wrist we will change it to doing it with your feet. We also added a feature that you could lift up the circle from the bottom if dropped it, drag it back to its starting position to make it start over with the size changing.

Our plan for tomorrow is to do some real user testing, documenting it in video and notes, and see where that leads us. 

FRIDAY:

USER TESTING, ANALYSING, PLANNING

Today I have been conducting some user testing. I’ve filmed those who was okay with being on video but written notes on all of their experiences.

Person 1:

“It felt like it was easy to match the circle, maybe lower the time frame?” This person never failed so I told them to fail one time to get the reaction that followed a failure. The person tried to catch it with their hands like we intended but this person has also seen med working with this project so I will take this in with some caution.  

Person 2:

I said nothing about being able to grab the circle with their hand, but only to adapt to the size changes. This person did not try to garb with their hands but put their feet together to stop the ball from falling to the “floor”. Tried one more time after getting to know that you can use your hands for this. This time we realised that the ball was maybe moving too fast, we increased the speed before but maybe we thought it was easy because we knew what was coming the entire time. Right now it is very skill based.

Person 3:

Was, like the previous person, just working with the feet. Didn’t realise that the hands were part of the sketch too. We tried again after telling them that they could use their hands. Did go for the ball but it was moving too fast for them to catch it.

Person 4:

Actually tried to grab it with their hands but not until it had hit the floor, was also working with the feet initially. It is hard to reach the top with the ball again to put it back to its first state.

What this tells us that maybe we have to go back to adapting our wrist to the ball instead. But also, now we have tried this so now it might be time to move on and try another sketch. My first thought is to go for the duck movement. But that’s for next week!

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Week 7 (12/10 - 16/10)

MONDAY

Today we had the kick off for the 3rd and last module of this course. We are going to work with kinesthetics.  More specifically the sense of movement. 

One thing that was brought up that I found very interesting was the fine and gross(small and big) movements and how emotions seem to be more connected to the big ones. When it was talked about I thought “what about flipping the finger?” but the more I thought about it and also the lecturer talked about it, I realised that even as we’re flipping the finger, which you mostly do with your hand, we put our entire body behind it to emphasise the meaning of it. You lean into the hand gesture in a way that makes you, in my own thoughts, threatening. Regarding emotions and motions, we are feeling the what the movement feels like on the inside, how it feels for us. But we are also feeling what other see our movements as, we often get embarrassed if we notice that something we do is weird or odd and people are looking. It’s not just about "phew, this action is heavy on the legs” but how it makes you feel as well, you might feel strange when doing something. Take myself as an example, I would feel very uncomfortable when doing something I’ve never done before, like climbing. I went for the first time a couple of weeks ago, the first climbs made me feel very unconfident and out of place because it’s something I’ve never done before and I’m surrounded by people who I imagine are good at it and judge me for doing it wrong. Of course you can also fake ‘til you make it. I do this all the time when just walking down the street. If I feel confident while doing something, I imagine people are going to perceive me as confident as well. To sum it up, challenging our regular movements are immediately felt, both from the inside and the outside. Our movements and emotions are related, our mental state is affected by our body, how, when, and how much it moves. They can also be connected to experiences, maybe some actions remind of us games or role plays we acted out as a kid. 

Todays lecture was really interesting and I think this could turn out the be the most fun out of the modules in this course, but also the hardest. Now we really need to physically engage with our project. In the last module my group panicked a little the last week and just decided that the shown patterns meant these specific things without really looking at them and feeling what it was showing. This time it is impossible to force a feeling on the user, this is all about the feeling in our body and mind. 

TUESDAY

On Tuesday we had a lecture where we went through all the code, how it works and different logical solutions we can use to get values from it. We also took a look at how Tensorflow and Posenet is working. After that we started to play around with it to get to know it. We founds some small flaws that can be could to keep in mind. It has a harder time locating bodyparts if your back is turned towards the camera, baggy clothes affect the accuracy of the body detection and when you cross your body on itself, like stretching your right hand over to the left, it gets a little fidgety. 

WEDNESDAY

After playing around with the code we sat down to discuss what to try and sketch up at first, we were inspired about contact improv dancing and wanted to force a person to move a certain way. Different body parts moving accordingly to assigned points, circle and square on the following picture, on the screen that are moving around differently. But first off, the video, or the pictured printed, are not mirrored so if I lean to the right it’s going to look like I am leaning to the left and to get the interaction with the screen to act as smooth as possible we need to mirror it. If we are to react to things happening on the screen it ruins the intuitive feel of it.

We want to force movement upon the user, and on us. From this we might catch an interesting movement to continue working with, or a way to keep exploring forced movement upon someone. Me and my group partner talked about assigning the control to either the computer or the person. This improv dance concept is assigning the control to the computer whereas a person throwing a ball would be in control in that situation. We decided to split these approaches and make a sketch each, one with the user being in control and one with the control coming from the computer. I went with the improv dance one, I dew a circle and gave it random behaviour which made it just move around randomly on the screen, then I drew a circle on following the right wrist. When the wrist then comes in contact with the random moving circle it changes colour indicating a “hit”. Getting it to move in a nice random behaviour has been a little tricky, I’ve tried a couple of different ways to get it to work, 

FRIDAY

It’s Friday afternoon now so the next step for next week is involving another body part, right now it’s only the right wrist and that only allows for a very flat interaction, you can stand in one spot and just move one arm to match the computer. It’s not very difficult which also makes it sort of boring and doesn’t engage the user very much. You stand in front of the screen for five seconds and then you’re done with it because you lose interest. 

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Presentations Module 2

Presentation day is here for the second module! I have to say that I get so inspired by what all the other people showed. Especially the way people have put the light onto or into some other material. Thinking back, this is probably something we should have tried when working with hope. Maybe we weren’t connecting to the light because of how it the actual LED looked. If we would have put something more to it to make it more dramatic maybe the light would be more expressive in the direction we hoped for.

I’m going to go trough the feedback that all of us got throughout the presentations and write down my thoughts on them and how we could have applied them on our project. 

A risk when working with interaction is to think of the input and output as two separate things. This was brought up when a group was presenting a plastic egg that you had to handle with care or else the LED light would get angry or stressed. They had a  cardboard box with the LED popping out from the top. Next to it they had the egg connected to wires through the roof into the box and on top of the egg they placed two photo resistors. The teachers spoke about bringing them together and having the input and output in the same object, in this case they could put the light inside the egg for a more direct reaction. When you force the user to look away to catch the reaction a disconnect arises. You force them to pause their interaction to look at what they are affecting. 

When another group presented they got feedback about how a return from a machine and human can be perceived differently. In their case is was about positive feedback. They tried to imitate a cheering crowd with the light. Starting to flicker a little, as someone starting clapping, and the growing in to a cheering crowd. Trying to imitate this action with the light didn’t really show the way they wanted. It wasn’t really clear that it was supposed to be a cheer either, it could be. Kind of like our situation with the hope. We had a vision about how it was supposed to look, but when we coded it and uploaded it to the lamp it didn’t look at all how we expected it to look. 

Another great thing that was brought up was that you can actually chase your metaphor too far. One group presented a candle that represented intimacy. They had made a candle out of real wax and some sort of plastic and it reacted to how close or far away a person was. If you stepped out of its “vision” it was also harder to light it back up depending on how long you stayed away. Making it look like a candle flattened their result quite a lot as it seemed like a finished concept whereas it could have been interesting if it wasn’t such an obvious thing, like a candle. 

So when it comes to our critic:

They liked that we had a mix of video and showing our final prototype live. They also liked that we talked about our important choices from the start that led us to the final joystick prototype. We tried to hide the joystick as well, remove the look and feel of it and that seemed like a good choice too. People were really stuck with what the sensors were literally for instead of somehow working it into the theme. Describing it as something to go with their concept.  However, our expression got lost in the end. The gentleness/aggressiveness isn’t obvious. It could easily have been anything else. I think we got tied up with the programming and wanting it to work that we forgot about the expression in the light a little. Like with the hope, we wanted it to be interpreted a certain way but in the end it wasn’t showing. We we kind of in the same scenario here, we just decided that these patterns meant what we wanted them to. But what would the light tell us if it could speak for itself, if we didn’t tell anyone what emotion or sensation we were going for, would people perceive it as that? In the next module this is definitely going to keep in mind, keep the focus on what the assignment actually is, which is going to be kinesthetics apparently. I am stoked, a classmate worked with it in the Studio course last semester and it seemed really exciting. From what I remember it’s about movement, how they feel and such. 

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Week 6 (5/10 - 9/10)

MONDAY:

After Fridays hassle with finding the double declaration of the x- and y-axis that stopped the entire code from working, we started with making sure that the code worked on both of our computers. We noticed that the cases didn’t work as we intended them to but figured out it was just an issue with the coordinates in the cases that had been mixed up so at least we got one easy problem to fix.

Last week we got feedback about removing the feel of it being a joystick by putting something on top of it. During the weekend I was looking at home for what I had to work with. If you want to to stuff in the workshop right now you have to know exactly what you need and we haven’t figured it out yet. I almost feel a little insecure about being in the workshop as well. Like I don’t belong there or something. I think it is because we haven’t been there that much really, and never alone. But I remember saving a prototype from last year that I think we re-use for this purpose. It’s an old snus container that we filled with a sort of foam that you can reshape. There is a hold in the middle of it and I think that we can put the joystick in there and then use the container as a work space instead. 

We put the joystick and snus container together and the outcome is great acutally, it really changes the way it feels like to fidget around with and since the space is bigger it feels like it’s more sensitive to movement as well. 

Now came the time to get the counter of the five seconds to work. What we want is for it to count five seconds, see how many rounds with the joystick that was made and then have the light adapt its behaviour to that. We sat down and had a quick little workshop where we put a timer on and started fidgeting with it. Trying to see how many rounds seemed appropriate for each mood of the light. We agreed on:

* sleepy / calm = 3 rounds per five seconds

* playful = 9 rounds per five seconds

* aggressive = 13 rounds per five seconds

So the faster you spin it the more aggressive you make it. I noticed that we sometimes call the light sleepy and other times calm but it’s the same behaviour we’re talking about. I’m going to try to keep calling it calm, because that’s what it is supposed to be. Getting back to the time and rounds counter, I added a variable for the amount of rounds which I added to every time you passed the fourth state, meaning you had rotated the joystick in a full circle. I have tried to add a timer today to but i never figured it out before it was time for coaching. This was our main focus during the coaching today, trying to get an idea of how to create, count the rounds during that time and put on a behaviour based on that.

We had an interesting coaching session where we found a some problems in the interactions with the timer we had in mind but also a solution for this.  First, if you had to do this for five seconds before you received some feedback that the joystick was changing something the interaction would be very distant. Since there’d be this five second delay you’d feel detached from the object. The risk is that a person would spin it a couple of rounds, see that nothing happened and leave it again, not noticing the change. The loop function in Arduino runs all the time we learned, so if we want to check for certain values we can put in there and it will keep constant track of that. So we put a start timer at the first case and then checked how long it had beens when it came back to that state after checking in at all four. This way you just had to spin it one lap and then you will get a reaction and if you changed your spinning pace it would be noticeable quicker. This made for a more direct and fluent interaction. Since we now needed counted the time that it took to finish a lap instead of how many rounds we could reach within the five seconds, we had to change the way we saw what behaviour it should take on. 

We sat down today and had a new little workshop where we tried to spin it in different speeds to see what felt appropriate for each state. What we now concluded was:

* calm = 480 milliseconds per round

* playful = between 480 and 1190 milliseconds per round

* aggressive = 1190 milliseconds per round

I also realised today that we don’t have starter state. Something to grab your attention before you start interacting with the joystick. A random light behaviour is currently on the table, it is up for discussion though. I think it’d be something people would want to investigate further or try to control somehow.

TUESDAY

I’ve been looking into how to make a way for us to count the time its been in each behaviour. This way we could keep track on how long it had been playful, aggressive etc. With this we could add nuance by adding behaviour based on that as well, if its, for example, aggressive for too long something happens. We got advised to change to a newer version of the code where they had added a function that kept the time of how long you’ve been in the cases, since we are not using cases right now we have to also change our behaviours and add them into cases. I didn’t know you could have it be in two cases simultaneously, but apparently that is possible as long as you put them in two different voids. Today has been spent on rewriting the code to fit to this concept. I made one void for the cases that checked the sensor, they joystick, making sure it was going through the full circle, its called sensorPattern. And then I made another void for the light behaviour where I added the light patterns to each behaviour, this one is called Behaviours. The sensorPattern works like the cases that were in the code when we got it, it just changed between those four cases based on the position of the joystick. Since we still wanted the light to act immediately on the speed of the rounds we still had to check for the speed in the loop and change the Behaviour cases in there. Redoing the code like this, implementing it in a new example took a LONG time, we got error after error and had to troubleshoot very many times. Luckily they were mostly small spelling mistakes or problems with where we had put the code to make it run flawlessly. This took the entire day for us, even some time in the evening. But now the plan for tomorrow is to finally add the timer to see how long we have been staying in each behaviour and add behaviours based on that.

WEDNESDAY

Today was the last day to make the greater changes since tomorrow will be spent on preparing a presentation for Fridays show ‘n’ tell. The plan was, as mentioned, to add nuance based on how long we’ve been in the same behaviour. So with the new code, each time we changed the light behaviour the was a timer that was reset. The problem with this is that the timer never goes above 0,11 - 0,14 seconds, even if we are in the same behaviour. We tried to come up with a reasonable explanation for this, but when we tried to print the time and add a behaviour based on that in the original example code with this specific time counter it works. When talking to a teacher about this it could turn out that since the loop is continuously running it could be that even if the behaviour is the same as it previously was, it resets every time the loop runs which takes about 10-15 milliseconds but then with a delay that we have put in it makes sense that the timer only goes up to 0,14 seconds, because then its put in the same behaviour case again and resets. This is not something we thought about when putting our logic in the loop. That time would be a constraint for us, something we couldn’t use at all. But since the loop is running with so fast intervals we could probably use it somehow. If we put a variable, behaviourCounter, with a start value of 0, it will add every time the loop runs which will be one way to count, it doesn’t have to be in specifically seconds so it doesn’t really matter. We just check for a fitting value for the time which the behaviour should change and base it off of that. We put it in the code and the counter works, now we just have to reset it every time we enter a new behaviour case. This turned out to be harder than it sounded, just putting the value back to 0 did not do the trick. It either just keeps counting or only goes up to 1. I think it is because it’s still being checked in the loop and then reseted every time, so this didn’t work out either.

In this module I have really let go of the fear to ask for help, us classmates are helping each other out a lot. We have received a lot of help from both classmates and teachers. All of the problems are code related and something we haven’t managed to google ourselves. Now I new some other group had encountered a similar problem again so I asked how they solved it. Something with flags. You put a value to a variable, caseFlag, to each case, so 1-4 with the starting case included. We then created another variable, flag, but put the value of that to zero. So the thought with this was that this value is always going to be one step behind. Every time loop runs it will check if these values were the same, when the behaviour has just changed they won’t match and if they aren’t it will put the same value to both of them and then set the counter . The next time the loop runs it will check again, this time they will be the same and then it will just add to this value. It looks like this:

First they are declared:

Then in the cases we write it like this:

This worked like a charm and I’m super grateful that we can study in a classroom environment that allows you to just quickly go to other people and see if they have any ideas or just get inspired by each others work too. 

With this we can now add behaviour that is based on this behaviourCounter, thank god! We just put an if statement in the case that checked for the  behaviourCounter and then added the new behaviour in that.

Finally everything is working as it should, we have added new behaviours to each state now when the longer it is staying in the same state it turns into a new behaviour. This the new behaviour pattern, and final behaviour of our joystick!:

We were thinking in the direction that being handled in an aggressive way makes you angry, and being angry for a very long time is tiring is so it will make you fall asleep. If you handle it calmly it will become tired and fall asleep, and lastly when you’re playing with it for too long it will also become sleepy after a while and then eventually go to sleep. When it is angry it will fall asleep faster than when you are playing with it. We put it like this because we think you kind of gain energy when playing and doing something fun as well as it being tiring. 

We are happy with how it is for now, we won’t have time to make any big changes and this is what we will show as our final sketch on Friday. Tomorrows goal is just setting up the presentation, figure out what we want to say, in what order and who will say what.

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Week 5 (28/9 - 2/10)

On Monday we came back from the weekend in the hopes of finding an input to match with the sensation of hope. Even though we weren’t certain of the expressiveness in our current light we kept trying with it today. Discussing what different options could be, what sensors could we use, what could the next step code-wise be and so on. What we found out was that we couldn’t really come to think of what the next step could be, especially when it came to the input. 

What was the user supposed to do with this, where was the interaction? We just had an emotion but nothing to do with it and since this is such a fast assignment we didn’t feel like we had time to just spend the day on this so we tried to move on a little.

We regularly take walks through the classroom to see what others are using and what they’re doing with it. Most people are right now tinkering with the pressure sensor, buttons or the light sensor. As usual, I wanted to try something that was different, I noticed that no one was working with the joystick as an input which got me interested in it. Then came the part of could we maybe match it to hope which is where the process turned for us. We really didn’t want to let the sensation of hope go, but at the same time the light wasn’t really showing the way we wanted it to and we had no vision for where this was supposed to go. We decided to start working with the joystick and see where that led us, hoping to get inspired.

picture from: https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects/arduino-joystick-interfacing

The joystick has an x-axis and y-axis with values that range from 0-1023 and then there is a click function to it that can either be 0 or 1, so there are a lot of values to work with. We started with trying to match the value of the colour to the values of the x- and y-axis, so when the axis values are at a minimum the LED turns off and when they hit the maximum value the light shines in full brightness. When we googled it turned out that there was an example for exactly this function on Arduino’s webpage, they used an RBG LED light so we just had to remove the code that we didn’t need which turned out to be easier than I thought. Since we only used one colour, green in my case, I tried to remove everything that had to do with the red and blue light and it worked. Now we had a functioning joystick and a light that responded to it but then what? Do we change emotion just like that? They’ve told us in the beginning of both modules to not be afraid to “kill our darlings”, maybe this is one of those moments. Do we want to stay with hope or rather go for the joystick as input?  Maybe the feeling of control could be easily applied to this since it sort of already comes with a sensation of control. We’re relating it to gaming where it is all about controlling a character with the two joysticks that are mostly used. Maybe we could add the feeling of trust and fear to control. Maybe you have to do slow movements with the joystick to gain its trust before you can interact with it. Maybe the light could act in unexpected ways to challenge the feeling of control.

We got some feedback on how it’s easy that the joystick becomes just a controller that controls the light and it wouldn’t be too interesting for this assignment. To get away from that we could play around with the interaction surface like putting something on it to hide that it is a joystick.  Since this was late in the afternoon we said to think it through until the next morning day, sit and fiddle with the joystick during the evening to see if we could think of any other feelings or actions that we could relate it to.

I got a message from my partner last night after getting home from school. She had discovered that by rubbing it in a circular motion it could spark a feeling of being gentle towards something. So today when arriving this morning we sat down and started to think of behaviours based on this feeling/sensation. We are thinking of showing opposites, so in one direction there is gentle and in the other there’s a feeling of aggression. In between those a small sweet spot that triggers a playful state. Of course just having these three states are not nuanced enough so we had to think of ways to explore this but it felt like we had a better shot at this than the feeling of hope so we agreed to go for this instead. I drew up a behavioural schedule to keep track of the different stages it’d go through as it right now.

I will explain it as the drawing could be hard to follow. 

- It initial state is an attention seeking one.

- Rub in in a calming matter for x amount of time -> it starts pulsing in a calming manner that means it becomes sleepy.

- Rub it in the sweet spot -> it becomes playful. We have a thought here that if you stop playing with it too soon it becomes annoyed with you.

- Rub it too aggressively -> it gets angry

To count this we were thinking about setting a timer to maybe 5 seconds and see how many rounds with the joystick was made during that time. Then from that we’ll get a behaviour. We were talking about setting one point on the joystick as a checkpoint. We assumed people were going to try to move it in a circular motion and move past the checkpoint every time they got there. When running this idea past our teacher, they asked why we didn’t make more checkpoints to make sure that it was actually moving it in a circular motion. Honestly, I have no idea, because of the lack programming knowledge I just didn’t think that far. But of course the interaction would work better if you make sure that it runs in the same circle at all times, otherwise a person could just move the joystick over the checkpoint by moving it back and forth. His point was to make one checkpoint in each corner of the grid. You would only be able to check off the second one if you had already hit the first one, and then the third one would only be available if you hit the second one and so on. This made sure that the joystick was constantly moving in a full circular motion. We got some help setting this up in code, there were some issues though. We made a function that put it in different states depending on where in the circle you were currently situated. We had some trouble getting this to work because we got errors that really made no sense. After hours of troubleshooting together with a teacher we finally found that two other variables got double declared and updated in the loop continuously. This is by far the most irritating thing about programming, small, small issues can really mess things up for you and you might not even get an error for exactly that mistake but NOTHING works. After solving that problem we just put in the coordinates for the four states you needed to check. It’s Friday afternoon and this was the last thing for this week. Hopefully next week, the last one we can get it to work like we want. I actually quite like what we are doing, and I enjoy working with the Arduino a lot. You get quick responses to what you’re doing and it doesn’t take a lot of code to make something cool.

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Week 4 (21/9-25/9)

Module 2 kick-off

It’s time for the second module of this course. This time we will be working with expressivity with constraints, in this case one of the constraints are the limit of using only one LED-light which you can only change the intensity and duration off. We went through some examples of point lights, which we are suppose to use and discussed them. From what I understand we are going to explore what we can express through this one light. This could be an interesting assignment, and it will be nice not having everyone making lots of noice in the classroom. I’m excited to get back to the Arduino because I’ve seen such cool things done with it, I want to get creative with it. All of us tried an example together with the teacher just to get a quick recap on how you wire the board. I managed pretty quickly and then started to tinkle with the different parameters in code to see what happened.

Getting to know the new code

We got a new example to work with and now we are exploring and trying to mimic light patterns from one of the papers, Harrison et al(2012). I started with with just changing it very easily from on state to another, from waving to blinking and so on. It looks fairly easy to work with, we just need to get some idea of what we are supposed to do. I think that is the worst part about these assignments so far. We never really know what we are supposed to present or what the end “product” should be. It’s a constant feeling of being lost and not knowing if what you’re doing is in the right direction. The coaching sessions are so important and mostly helpful but sometimes I feel like they are just more confusing, negative and almost condescending. A couple of times we haven’t really been pushed in a direction or gotten comments of where or what we should think of next. This has just happened one or two times times though, most of the time you sit on pins and needles just to grab the teacher as soon as they get inside the classroom to get some sense of direction.

The first a little more complicated light pattern I managed to make was the EKG pattern. I had some trouble because I needed two different setting on the increase state and didn’t know how to manage this. I tried the logic that if the previous state was this, do this, or if the previous state was that, do that. I ended up making two new states for this because the increase with different conditions didn’t work. After making the statements the pattern was quite easy to put together to its finished look. 

Notification from loved ones

Today we talked about more of an idea for the assignment. We thought about notifications from loved ones. Since a phone most of the time only have one little light to show different kinds of notifications we thought of that as an inspirational source. How the notification could act and behave based on who is sending it to you and how you handle it upon receiving it. We thought about three different stages the light could go trough when you’d receive something on your phone.

1. It’s excited to reach you at first. It’d light up, start blinking or flickering a little to then go off again, stay off for a quick second and the go on again. This would run for a while. If you wait for a longer time before opening the notification it goes on to the next stage.

2. The  anxious state. The light gets worried, as a loved one would be if they didn’t hear back from you. If you continue to leave it for an even longer time it goes to the third and last stage.

3. The neglected state. It feels lonely, like you don’t care about it. It’s attention isn’t worth your time.

This idea was later scrapped and I will come to that but reading back on these stages it makes absolutely no sense for me to have the neglected state last. The anxious should come last. You wouldn’t feel anxious to then be feeling neglected, it would probably come to you the other way around. You send an excited notification to a loved one, they don’t answer. You feel annoyed and neglected. If still not receiving a response you would maybe start to worry and get that anxious feeling we were after.

Coaching

As always when getting coaching from the teachers they want more nuance. We talked about making it more continued. Not making it just exited or anxious, but having states that are in-between. It doesn’t have to be either this or that, it can be both. We also got the comment that this is pretty much just switching between states, but isn’t anything just going to be switching between different states? Could we make it start two cases at the same time? I think that would only go for the highest value of brightness all the time so it would be hard to see that it was two different states happening at once. 

Feeling the emotions

We noticed that many people was working with exploring emotions and some of the groups had gotten good feedback for doing this, that it was in the right direction and so on. We took a step back and looked at what we had thus far. We had my EKG pattern and my partners bright flash pattern, two completely different patterns. We sat down and took out time watching each patterns and see what it made us feel and think of. 

EKG:

- It’s slow, almost making me wait for the next change to happen.

- Calming

- Twinkeling

- It sort of has the same as a classic film structure

- “Hope” -classmate.

BRIGHT FLASH:

- Could be a counter.

- Looks like breathing, I started matching my breathing with it.

- Attention seeking

- Unsteadiness because of the flickering at the top. 

We really liked the fact that one classmate that we asked thought of hope as she saw the EKG and could relate to it, it was an interesting feeling and we wanted to keep working with it.

So what  can we do with the feeling of hope? We started asking ourselves questions. Why do we feel hope? What about it sparks an emotion of hope? What other patterns spark hope? What do they have in common? Some of these were not answered but the more we talked about it I think it sparks hope within me when the brightness goes from complete darkness and then increases, which it does in the EKG. Does the way of increase make a different? That is our next step. Making different kinds of increases to see if they make us feel different. We really want to make an exponential curve since the ones we have now are all linear. There are different kinds of hope, will this make us feel a different one? Can we play with how many set back a person can take before they lose hope?

Different increases or patterns we could try:

We managed, with some help, to make an exponential increase but I didn’t really give us the feeling we were aiming for. Partly because everything happened so fast. Since it is an exponential it increases very quickly, and we didn’t think of that. We managed to slow it down a little by putting a time frame on it but it still felt a little off to us. The light wasn’t expressing hope, I didn’t connect to it at all actually

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Week 3 (14/9-18/9)

I have to admit, I thought I had written about this week but apparently not so I’m writing this post a couple of weeks after it occurred but I will try to be as detailed as I can. Since I am writing this some time after I will also include thoughts and reflections about our process. 

It’s the last week and I am feeling stressed. This week has been all about working on the square and making it work. A big problem we have had is to make it move in a smooth way. We have tried to do it stepwise but it doesn’t look very good, when googling we also found a way to put a maximum size and a minimum size on it and then add a transition with CSS. The problem here is that we don’t really want it to just go from small to big or big to small but rather be reactive all the time and show small little changes as well as the big ones. We were given a small code snippet last week to turn the size into percentages and then it should be easier to have it change dynamically to the sound. During every coaching we are also hammered with the fact that we need more nuance which I get, but it is really hard to think about. It has to be an interesting interaction because that what it is all about after all. Right now, what we had at the beginning of the week was mostly a visualisation of the sound. At this time I was feeling very insecure about asking for help, both from teachers and fellow classmates. I always felt like I disturbed my classmates or felt stupid for not understanding. Since we had gotten this code I thought in the lines that we are supposed to understand this and work with it. What i didn’t realise then is that all of us struggled a lot with it. During the last couple of days we received A LOT of help from another group that was pretty far along already. They didn’t do everything but they helped us with most of the logic. We based the size of the square to the decibel of the assigned bucket which made it constantly change since the volume of the noise changed. Now it just needed some fine tuning because it was almost too sensitive at this point, it was fidgeting all over the place and was very hard to make sense of. But the people helping us had encountered a similar problem and put in what we called a gain, that lowered all the highest values and made it look less sensitive. 

Since sound is different depending on the environment we sometimes have to change what buckets the square reacts to but it wasn’t a very big problem. Usually it was about the same when you whistle so I usually did that for one of the inputs and then a tone generator for the other one. Around this time the week was already going towards Friday and the show ‘n’ tell which meant we really had to add the nuance. Coding in this module took forever compared to the other two and I realise that if we could have gone back we could probably have done such a better job and also gotten it to a more interesting stage with more to it. Of course, I think this is what everyone else feels like and probably how this course usually turns out every year. You get used to the method of working with these fast modules and realising where you should be in the process each week. We spent most of the first week on tinkering and didn’t really get anywhere and since we started fresh this last week we didn’t really have time to add that much of the nuance. In the second module we had gotten a lot further by the second week and could start thinking about inputs. Here, in the first module, we underestimated the input factor and instead got very stuck on the nuance of the square. When losing the input part we lost the skill factor along with it. The module was Skill & Sound and in Dreyfus’ (2002) paper he talks very much about skill-full actions and, though in a very psychological way, there are very important mentioned things we can apply when designing interaction. The different levels of expertise and how we store everything we learn and do for later occasions. How we can think about the learning curve and that we can use humans previous experiences to make the interaction more meaningful or interesting, if it’s challenging what we know or take advantage of our basic skills. It’s an interesting paper but it’s very heavy for me who is not very acquainted with psychology or philosophy, I don’t even quite know what it counts as, psychological or philosophical. 

Back to the module!  On Thursday, very last minute, we managed to get some nuance in there at last. With the very reactive behaviour of the square almost reminded me of something alive. So we wanted to add to that liveliness, making it something you had to get to know and cherish. When getting to know a new person or especially an animal many things can be scary, among them sudden movements or noise. This was something we could apply to our square so when there was a sudden peak in the sound we wanted the square to act like it got startled and to gain back its trust you had to be patient and simply wait for it to come back to you. Whenever this peak occurred the square gets a fixed size and the opacity disappears. It then slowly increases and until it comes back to 100% you can’t manipulate or “hang out” with the square. So you’d have to learn how it worked, what sound it reacted to but not too forward or hectic. The time when you couldn’t manipulate the square differed, this wasn’t actually intentional and I still don’t know why it acts this way but it turned out pretty well.

SHOW ‘N’ TELL

I am a nervous speaker but the format of this wasn’t too bad actually. I liked that everyone sat down on the same level, it made it feel more like a talk among equals and not as the spotlight was aimed at us in the same way as when you talk in front of the class with the lights out and a presentation on the whiteboard. We got five minutes to talk which isn’t that much, especially when you have things to show at the same time. Of course there is the pressure of making sure everything is working when you show it. It went well, I said everything I was supposed to and so did my partner. I will go through the critique we got as well. I wasn’t very good at taking notes in this module, something I got massively better at since then. 

These are the notes that I’ve written down from the first show ‘n’ tell, it’s so bad I almost don’t want to show them but here we go, let’s make this a learning opportunity! 

“Different visualisations can still be basically the same sort of interaction - Basic same state. Imagine a knob that you amp up or dial down.

Think of something interesting to explore beforehand. Set a “concept” beforehand Scrap ideas and start from scratch. Get a fresh perspective. “leave that and find something else”

Make many iterations, rather than just evolving/changing one

Aesthetics vs organic Nuance of input didn’t match the nuance of output Used a square to not make it a specific thing.”

Alright, so I will try to unpack this and make sense of it. The text that is not bold is critique that others got that I thought was valuable.  Many groups had something that almost worked just like visuals of the sound volume, like ours did a couple of days prior. Some people had done different sketches but the state of the interaction and what was happening on the screen weren’t that different if you started to compare them. They were manipulated by the same values and the input was also sort of the same just a different bodily skill. 

Since this module was the first, all of us were a little lost in what the intended idea of the projects was. It felt like we had been put in a blank empty room and was told to “just do something”. It wasn’t until the the show ‘n’ tell was finished that I had understood that this was about exploring something, unpacking something that could be interesting for our industry and that was why it could be a good method to have an idea of what you wanted to explore so you could figure out different ways of doing that instead of working with your current sketch as a main source of inspiration, there was no real thought behind it. This is why we were recommended to iterate as much as we could and then scrap our sketches at some point and start fresh, but still with the same exploration idea in mind. To get a broader knowledge base and cover more ground. 

And then comes the bold text, I remember they talked about aesthetics vs organic but not exactly what was said. I can imagine that it had something to do with the different approaches among the groups. It was almost that either you had gone for something that looked very aesthetically pleasing or something that acted like an organic creature, like ours. I know a couple of other groups created something animalistic as well. We had a line in our presentation that we got a really good reaction from. “our nuance of input didn’t match the nuance of output”. We said this when talking about the texts that just capitalised or went from smaller to bigger in one jump. It didn’t matter how smooth the whistle or sound was, the length of it or anything really, they just did this stepwise change that didn’t match the feeling of our input. It created a feeling of disconnect from what was happening on screen. They also liked that we had intentionally used a square for it to not be relatable to anything so I’m very happy with that choice. Something I didn’t write down but remember is that an interesting point was that we shifted the control between the user and the square, the system itself. By adding the feature of the faded square that you couldn’t manipulate we give the system momentarily control and time to reconvene its calm. 

This module was really intense, looking back to it now it was very interesting but at the time I just wanted it to be over. I was sick of feeling lost in the process, of course the next modules followed the same pattern but at least then you had this feedback to go on and you had a better picture on how it you could work with these quick and intense projects. I wasn’t really interested in noise and think this was probably the module I enjoyed the least, it was a good module to start the year off with though. You got right in to the practical work and I’m happy this warmed us up for the next ones as they were much more interesting in my mind.

Reference:

Dreyfus, H. L. (2002). Intelligence without representation—Merleau-Ponty's critique of mental representation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(4), 367–393.

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Week 2 (7/9-11/9)

Video Challenge

At the end of our second lecture we got a small video challenge where we were to choose one of the interaction attributes. It was supposed to be a really quick assignment to just spend the last 30 minutes of the day on. I joined the stepwise - fluent group. Since I was waiting for my Covid test results I joined them via Zoom. I wish I could’ve been there with them since not being there resulted in a kind of distance. I was sometimes forgotten when they moved around and didn’t get to see what they sketched on and so forth. I did the best I could and came with some suggestions and also helped film a clip through my phone that they could use. We talked about everyday life things that people do in different way. I immediately thought of people who send ten short texts,  instead of one long with all the info in the same text, sometimes with several questions after one another. This is very typical between close friends I think, them being a little annoying to get attention faster. It does create a more stepwise way to read and you never know if the other person is done or not. 

From the reaction of the teacher I think we might have miss-interpreted the assignment a little, or rather, he had probably expected other ways to be show off the fluent vs stepwise interaction. I definitely think we could have shown some of the ones we had in a clearer way. The texting conversation wasn’t too obvious and had to be explained. We wanted to show the cutting with the scissors a bit different but didn’t get it to work. When you cut gift wrapping paper you can usually just cut a small bit and then drag the scissor along the paper until the end. This is what we wanted to do but the regular printing paper ripped all the time so we did it with a carpet knife instead.

Module 1: Skill & Sound

Last week I was home with cold symtoms and awaited the result from my Covid-19 test so this was my first week back at school grounds and it felt great! I noticed that after the first day back I had already gotten more done than the entire week before. I like that we have our own space that is just ours and I think it makes me more motivated with the school work too.

I am still struggling with the programming. It is better when you can sit down with your actual group partner but none of us seem very talented when it comes to JavaScript. We talked about what should be possible or not but the problem is that we can’t put it down in code. 

Text too much of a concept

The very first example we made was one with a text that said Hello. When reaching a peak in raw value, which from my understanding is the volume of the sound, the text got capitalised.  We of coursed thought that this is a good start but there should be more to it. From this we created a black border with the same text as before but always in capitalised letters. We then made another text that also said Hello but was coloured red and a smaller font size. We wanted to make it grow in to the black outline. During the coaching we were advised against this though and I get why. This was too much of a concept and hard to develop since there was an end goal to it, getting the red text to match the black outlines.

Square thing

We archived and went away from all the code that had to do with the Hello text. I felt like I could use a completely clean canvas (except for the example code) to work with. We discussed the matter of the text being too much of a concept and saw that many other did just shapes. Circles seems to be the standard and we want to try something different and not get too influenced by what others are doing so we have decided to make a square. The square, or just any shape are mostly not coupled to anything, it’s just a shape within a border on a screen. I managed to draw it up in canvas and get it to react to peaks the same way the text was in the previous sketches, it’s red because I wanted it to be clearly visible on the white background. We talked a lot about wanting to people to cooperate. In the prototyping course last semester we had the game control assignment that I also mentioned in the previous entry. Like my group did then, forcing people to play together or else it wouldn’t work, my group member and I in this Module wanted to force people together because it was so successful then. We discussed having one person control the width of the square and another person the height. We really want to make it move in a very fluent way and that is something we discussed with the teachers today but haven’t gotten to work with. They wrote down some code on the board for us but I find it really hard to apply things to our specific code. Especially when you don’t know exactly what the code means or does. It is some sort of math calculation but I haven’t studied math for probably seven or eight years and I can really notice how much of the knowledge I’ve lost during this time away from it.

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Week 1 (31/8-4/9)

Kick-off #1

So today was our first day back to school. We had a quick kick-off where we went through the layout and approach for this semester. I was really glad to hear that most of the teaching and working is going to be back at the school. I have a hard time with distance learning and I have a feeling my discipline is would be terrible again after the summer off.  

Kick-off#2 and assignment introduction

Today we had our first lecture and we also got introduced to the first assignment which is based on skill and sound, which the second paper from yesterday explained well. I am glad to get back to programming but also worried because it feels like I’ve just completely forgotten everything about it. Thinking back, I wished I was one of those people who were involved and sat with it during the summer as well. Even though I find things fun, like the programming, my mind immediately grows a distaste for doing anything that has to do with school during the time off. 

The examples

The examples are all about sound, frequency, amplitude, decibels and such. I had no clue what either of these things mean so the first thing I had to do was search on youtube for an explanation video. We are working in different pairs throughout this entire course, which I like because then you have someone to throwing around ideas with, someone to pick your brain when we run into problems and such. We started discussing what a nice concept could be, everything from simpler tone finders to small games came up, or something like increasing your pulse and having it show on the screen. This is not supposed to be a finished concept though and thinking of that we fell back to just discussing what we could use to create a sound that we could later work with.

I recently watched the movie Miss Congeniality where the main character plays on glasses and I thought that maybe that is something we can try. It could be a little hard since you have to have somewhat of a knowledge of how much water you need in the glasses for it to make the right sound. My partner also discussed blowing in bottles to get that dark whistle sound that they make. They both seem like interesting inputs to try out. Somewhere in the topic of having this be a collaborative experience was put on the table so now the thought of two different outputs started flickering. What if you were to move something on the screen and one of the inputs was in control of the x-axis and the other one controlled the y-axis? We started playing out with finding different frequencies to work with by logging the values that the different inputs made.

Literature

Before, in previous courses I’ve sometimes gotten the impression that some of the literature is just put there because we have to read something. It hasn’t felt relevant to the current situation or is too far off our level of understanding. These papers were truly interesting, I enjoyed reading them and they fit really well into where we are at in the education. 

One of them, Djajadiningrat et al 2007, is about how the body is used less and less in interaction now when many things are screen based with only buttons. Another one, Dreyfus 2002, explains two elements involved in intelligent behaviour, learning och skill-full action. The intentional arc which is the connection between the world and the body. New skills are saved as experience for later use. The second element, maximal grip, is about bodies way of responding to situations in the most optimal way.

The first one really made you think about the way you interact with objects in the everyday life. When making dinner after this I was at first a bit excited when I realised we have knobs on the stove and that there had been some other interaction other than a button being pressed. I realised though, that I live in an older apartment where some of the appliances have a couple of years on their neck and that most new ones have replaced the knobs for a touch interactions. It also reminded me of an assignment we had last year where we replaced games regular controls with embodied Arduino based ones. That assignment was really fun, to be creative and having to abandon the “usual ways”. Throwing people together and forcing them to use their body in a way they are not used resulted in weird but fun situations. We also noticed that the players tended to get more competitive and involved in the game when standing up and making use of their body instead of just using your hands. It’s a bit sad that so many things and skills we are capable of are lost because of technology evolving, it should be the other way around. 

The previous year I wasn’t very good at keeping up with the literature and that was something I decided to get better at this year. I read both of the papers yesterday and having read them the lecture and assignment made more sense. I had an easier time keeping up with the terms, illustrations and so on because of it. When getting to the examples and the lecturer going through the code I felt a little better, I understood at least some of it. It also felt good to hear that it is okay to take a day to just tinker and play around with the code to get to know it. While it is nice having a base to work from and getting a look at how it is supposed to look it is a little messy getting to know someones else’s work. 

References:

Djajadiningrat, T., Matthews, B., & Stienstra, M. (2007). Easy doesn’t do it: skill and expression in tangible aesthetics. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(8), 657-676.

Dreyfus, H. L. (2002). Intelligence without representation—Merleau-Ponty's critique of mental representation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(4), 367–393.