Research

Project Ideas

The following post will explain the process that we had to get to our last idea (we hope) for the Final Project for Physical Computing. It has being one of the most interesting brain storming and not being afraid to explore every idea that came to us. After defining parameter for the main purpose for the project we first taught in the Abacus, but still we didn’t like that the Abacus was still and did not have a rich interaction with the user, also it took the person outside of their routine and didn’t engage them. So we went off and came with the idea of the pajamas. What we liked about the pijamas is that depending in your mood you will use a tight or loose pajama, also the interaction of doing an action that was rutinary and being conscious about it.

The problem with the pijama was still that it did not have a rich interaction, and that there where many other factors that can influence the decision of choosing a pajama. So we incorporated the idea of the Mirror. The mirror is an important device for women and we interact a lot with it, so we wanted to track how much time a women spent in front of a mirror. Several projects came out with the idea of the mirror but still it was lacking of our purpose. So we took us, and thought about different handles, that again every day you will use a handle to open the door, and well giving a person different handles with different shapes and colors, that the person will have to use depending in their mood.

Again with this idea we could not control outside elements such as, Who is opening the door? What if the person does not even think about it at all? This brought the idea of a shade that depending in how you moved it and touch it, it will register certain information. But again, now we had a rich interaction but we where lacking of substance, or another way to say it meaning. We presented this ideas to Tom, who question them, and help us out to come with what we originally wanted, he put us back on track after discussing the Abacus idea (this was one of the fist ideas) he mention that we could do of the scale was of a three that you could modify its extremes depending on your mood.with the same concept of the abacus a scale with different rows, we really like this idea, and further developed. The problem with the scale was a design problem, because we were thinking of an abacous in which you could pass the marbles from side to side. So nothing seemed to work without taking out many ideas of the design. One idea that came out

This project was color based. And we worked a lot with this idea, conceptualizing the three and even doing user testing. We developed different color scales one in which we used the hue theory other using complementary colors and other using the basic colors. We where now “completely sure” of our idea and even thinking of buying material, when we started questioning again, the meaning, and our intention. Another idea came in the way of the need to improve communication between couples, and that this idea was not achieving this. So we work with a bottle as an output that could compare a couple’s feelings. Now the three will not be just for women, it would be for the couple. We went back with the scale idea, and tought of a zig-zag scale nested in a wood box, this will allow us to move the marbles along and to equilibrate both sides.

After again questioning the purpose of the project we came up with the idea of using the clock to express your emotions, here we were exploring the couples problems and things that they could not know about each other or could not speak out loud. We added the concept of the period and how one handle will be dedicated to track the women’s period and tell the men when the women is getting their period. We stood with this idea, and met to buy materials and explore different methods with it.

Part I. RESEARCH

After discussing several ideas, and looking to find a common ground, we realize we were missing hearing of what other people had to say about their personal way of expressing feelings. So we did a qualitative phase of asking people general questions. The two first question where:

*How do people express their emotions?

*How can an external person read the emotions of others?

With these two questions the project started its research phase. We interview different people and met the following day and discuss what we found. Mainly we found that the women we interviewed had a different way to express their emotions, but the main form that we found was that we express our emotions trough gestures. But gesture also can be tricky because people can easily use other gestures about how they are really feeling. So in this phase we also found a lot of interest in the project of different women really interested in being able to track their daily emotions and look back to it, and also being able to recognize cycles. We could have to approaches to the project, one was to track the physical part, the most known was temperature, the other was more the emotional state. We could do both but we are more interested in this stage to develop a device to track the emotional state.

At the end of this meeting we decided to ask a more specific question regarding our project. It was one question:

*With what variable/device would you track your moods?

We been focusing mainly in trying to get an original input that does not interpret the emotions. So after making this question we came up with different characteristics that we wanted in the interaction with the device:

1. Intuitive: That the user didn’t need to have previous experience with it, and could really easily express or use the device to give an input of a general state of his emotion.

2. Practical: That it didn’t take the person out of it’s routine. Because we heard a lot of comments like “I even have a hard time remembering to take my pill” So we wan to create something that didn’t require that much effort of women, so we could have the information every day.

3. Related: For this we mean that it has a relationship of a resume of the emotions of all the day, a device that could make people think about what they have felt.

4. Significant: That could contain the emotions of a day.

5. Transparent: That we can be able to create an output from it, so we know we can go so abstract.

The ideas that came up where the following:

# Handle

# Pijama

# Abaco

# Mirror

# Chime

# Lights
From this point we are still discussing if we are going to combine them or if we are going to go for one.

Last, we defined what we wanted to do:

A device that could track every day the general state of emotion of a Women. In which the person could give a personal meaning to the different variables that we would present.