Homework 1

Based on what I have learned from the slides and the reading, my attitude towards the responsive environment has changed. Previously, I thought that the environment is there before any visitor come in, so it’s the visitors’ responsibility to discover, and try to interact with the environment. While the reading uses the metaphor of orchestra to describe this kind of relationship. One of the reasons why we enjoy the orchestra’s performance is that we know how each musical instruments sound like in advance. So that we could enjoy their joint effort. This is also true when we talk about a responsive environment. Instead of passively responding to users’ behavior, it should have certain ways to induce the users to take certain actions. In this way, users can clearly know the correspondence between their actions and the feedback of the environment. It’s more like two strangers doing self-introductions before talking about other things. I think this is quite important to my final project. One thing I don’t like much about the Team Lab is that it tells you what you should do and how the responsive mechanism works before entering the room. From my point of view, these things should be self-evident, or at least there should be some hints motivating the user to try different actions. Giving them instructions is definitely not the best way. So in the following case, I think by implementing two sensors to it, its responsiveness will be improved by a lot, thus making the users have a better experience in that space. The environment I have chosen is our library. One of the issues I heard from my friends is that the seats will always be occupied by personal belongings for hours and the noise is sometimes loud. This is partly because of the lack of responsiveness of the library. By using the PIR motion sensor, it’s easy to detect whether there is a person on the seat. If there are no people sitting there, the LED will be on, indicating that this seat is available. Here is how it works.

Besides this sensor, another loudness sensor will be used to monitor the DB of the whole environment. If the environment is too noisy, the lights will be on to warn people to lower their voices.

In this way, The library is taking actions based on the users’ behavior to maintain its quietness and order. And the functions are also self-evident and very easy to identify.