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First, our group exchanged our ideas on the three stories and shared our imaginative artefacts. After a discussion, we decided to work on Morgan’s idea:

…an interactive bed where patients lie down, and a holographic schematic of their bodies’ autonomy appears above them. It would also highlight where an infection may be centralized in the body and propose remedies for various illnesses based on the nature of the diagnosis.

This concept is derived from The Plague by Yang Leisheng, a world that is plagued by a nameless disease that turned people into stone. This device would function as an examination to decide whether a person is “stoned” or not, and upload this essential personal health information into a database controlled by the government. Since the original idea of a bed would be too much to accomplish with the limited materials, we decided to change it into a wearable armour-like device on the hand that functions the same. The design of this armour has many references to the armour in Ironman as well as Pip-boy in the Fallout series. I personally contribute to creating the prototype, revising the main storyline and fleshing out details of the plot.

In making the prototype, Morgan is our main designer as he found blueprints references for the cardboard main body, and we followed these blueprints to make according to cardboard parts.  We then assembled these components using glue guns. For the screen that shows the scanning result of people, we decide to draw the whole setting by hand. 

The finished product was pretty much what we had in our heads, it contains an upper part that could move upwards and downwards. One thing to note is that the linkages were delicate so we had to be extra careful when putting on and off the device; it was actually broken during our first rehearsal and we tried several ways to reinforce the structure successfully. 

Script:

Roles:
Narrator: Jason/Morgan
2 Crows: Maryam (with the sensor)
Frida (killer)
3 victims/participants : Jason (not-stoned) (best friend to Morgan)
Shake (stoned) (best friend to Morgan)
Morgan (half stoned) (best friend)

Narration 20s
Scene 1: The Decision 2 min
Scene 2: Fight or Flight 40s
Scene 3:
Ending: Ask 2-3 members of the audience if they want to partake in the game
Take videos
Interactive

Roles:
Narrator: Jason/Morgan
2 Crows: Maryam (with the sensor)
Frida (killer)
3 victims/participants : Jason (not-stoned) (best friend to Morgan)
Shake (stoned) (best friend to Morgan)
Morgan (half stoned) (best friend)
Mock Script
Narrator: In this apocalyptic world, there is a deadly virus that infects people through bodily contact. Once affected, the victims turns into stone at various rates. To prevent further outbreak, all citizens will be subjected and forced to oblige to random health checks at all times.

Jason runs into the circle, and begins as the first patient getting tested
Shake stands in the middle, being the stoned
Morgan will stand at the opposite end, being half-stoned

Crows: YOU THREE, stop right now! You are now subjected to a random mandatory health check from the government.

Crow full scans Jason, and says he’s good
Crow full scans Shake, and beeps for discrepancy! Shake will drop to his knees, and “die”
Now, crow will scan Morgan, who is half stoned, and he runs away
*running motion from morgan* *he gets caught*

Morgan: No! Please don’t kill me! I have family at home, and my TWO friends who are with me!

Jason and Shake runs up, now they are his friends

Jason and Shake: No! Don’t kill Morgan! He’s such a good friend, husband, ….

*Killer Crow will hesitate, and ask the audience: Should I kill him? *
*Audience speaks*

Sensor Crow: For the sake of our society and our job, just kill him!

Killer Crow: *hesitates*, FINE. *hits and kills morgan*
*scene 1 is over, narrator runs back to the whiteboard to prepare the second scene*

Narrator: With Morgan being killed, the two friends of his are angry. As a result, they seek to take revenge. But, how would they do that without a weapon?
SCENE TWO DIFFERENT CHARACTERS

*Scene Two Starts*
*Morgan is now a dead crow, who lays on the ground with the sensor*

Shake: Hey, this is our perfect chance to get revenge! Let’s snatch this right off of him.
Jason: Are you sure? I’m also mad, but this isn’t the greatest idea, we could end up like Morgan . . .

Shake: Of course! Hurry up, take the sensor off of him
*Jason takes the sensor off of Morgan and wears it for himself*
*Then, the two other crows will appear . . . they are off-duty without sensors
*Suddenly, Shake comes from the back and hits both of them onto the ground*
Crows: What do you want?? (scared and panick) What you’re doing is illegal!
Shake: I don’t care! You murdered my best friend.
Crows: It was for the sake of the world
Jason: Audience, do I kill the crows who murdered my best friend, or keep them alive?
*depending on the audiences response*
You know what, I will not be like you . . . Killing you will not bring Morgan back, or any joy out of me. Stop this ridicious killing and find a cure to the virus!

Ideas?
Morgan – After five months of extensive research, a cure was finally found for the virus. Humanity lives, and the crows & civilans who worked together are given a Nobel Peace Price.

THE ENDING
Interactive: Ask 3-4 members in the audience if they would like to particpate. Scan them, and them randomly diagnose them with stoned/not stoned. It would be a random fun activity to do…

We had three meetings to rehearse the whole scene; the teamwork was really great, as we all found the most suitable parts for ourselves and enjoyed performing this hilarious scene.

On the presentation day, there was a group that created a piece that resembles a 3D Virtual Reality Headset connected with a pair of sensor gloves, which impressed me. One person would wear the headset, and he would descript what he saw, heard, and even felt in this imaginative virtual reality. It was based on the immersive laser projectors in The Veldt. The decoration of the headset was done carefully and artistically, and the way they imitated the real VR headset by adding human interactions (singing, touching, using different images) conveyed the idea of interaction, as well as people’s potential experience during this sort of interaction perfectly. 

Step 1: Prepare your tilt sensor

Task #1: Solder

The goal of this task is to prepare the sensor.  For this step, I first tried to wind up the wires with the sensors, and then use the electrical tape to fixate the soldered parts; finally, I use soldering guns to successfully solder them together. 

Task #2:

Connect the tilt sensor cables to your Arduino using a capacitor as the circuit diagram: The circuit is a relatively easy one, so it didn’t take long, but I still ask the LA for help the first time for I misread the part that lead to the sensor and the ground. After correctly understanding that there are two wires connected to the ground, I finished the circuit. 

Task #3: Program

This step only requires copying the code and testing it on our arduino; it went pretty smooth.

Step 2: Refine the code

Task #1:

“Upload the following sketch to only print 1 when the tilt sensor changes from 0 to 1, and 0 when from 1 to 0”. It’s also a simple one and I run the code successfully. 

Step 3: Wear your sensor

“Fix the tilt switch using paper tape to your body, making it a wearable sensor. The sensor should be along your forearm, so that you can use it to detect when your forearm is facing up.” 

For this part, I just taped the sensor I soldered before to my forearm and tried to move it up and down. It worked well and the monitor showed values between 0 to 1. 

Step 4: Bicep Curl Workout!

Unfortunately, I accidentally overwrote the code I saved in class, so I only got some videos to prove that I achieved these tasks. 

Task #1: Add a conditional to your sketch so that it shows a message on the Serial Monitor only when a full biceps curl has been completed.

<iframe src=”https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_C8h0n5s2MgpG8kv_UwuksCTC1dqYW6l/preview” width=”640″ height=”480″ allow=”autoplay”></iframe>

Task #2: Count the curls, adding one to its value every time that the user does a complete bicep curl. 

To modify the code, I firstly declared a global variable named “total”, and then I wrote “total == total + 1”, which means adding one to the total every time a full bicep curl is finished.  

Task #3: Set a limit to the variable so that when the total reaches 8, Print “Yay, you’ve done one set of curls”. 

The result is as followed:

Circuit 1: Fade

To build this circuit, I followed the instructions on the Arduino official website. I assembled the wires relatively quick since we’ve practised doing this in class before. However, the circuit didn’t work under the code at my first attempt; and after asking the help of one LA, she pointed out that this code requires one to pin 9 specifically as the ledpin, while I wrongfully thought that using pin 8 would also work. After I reconnected to pin 9, the circuit worked smoothly.  

<iframe src=”https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nR4Y1FBiz5yeFlDnqI1yCkr3LJBCdd9J/preview” width=”640″ height=”480″ allow=”autoplay”></iframe>

Circuit 2: toneMelody

Again, following the official instructions, I assemblage this circuit easily for it only involves a piezo buzzer on the breadboard. After running the sample code from Arduino examples, the circuit plays the tone successful (I didn’t recognize this music though).

<iframe src=”https://drive.google.com/file/d/17arYgzqd-AKCR8LNqvkRi5hwCxb2PqGx/preview” width=”640″ height=”480″ allow=”autoplay”></iframe>

Circuit 3: Speed Game

This is the hardest task. I tried to build it all by myself at first, but I read the sample diagram wrongly, and as a result, my circuit went wrong completely. Although the code showed that it was running, my circuit didn’t respond to my pressing the buttons. As a result, I joined my classmates and we tried to build the circuit all over again. I realized that among all the mistakes that I made, the biggest one is that I thought it was OK for the 220 Ohm resistors not to be placed on the part that was across the two parts of the breadboard, while it was actually essential for them to connect the two parts. After almost rebuilding the whole circuit completely, it finally worked and we were able to race each other by pressing the buttons. 

The failed attempt 1

Final success.

Define Interaction

I would like to adopt a definition similar to that in The Art of Interactive Design, the author of which defines interaction as “a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak” (6).  There’s of course a difference between low interactivity and high interactivity in this definition, and I’d like to define the lowest interactivity as “the initiator (A) of the first action in this process would get a response of this action, which will in return influence the next action of A”. 

https://www.manamana.net/video/detail?id=70417#!zh

https://www.manamana.net/video/detail?id=5671#!zh

As much as this piece created by Alienware also features interactivity in its description, I consider it not one of the interactive art projects that I define, for it doesn’t quite generate the dynamic, reciprocal interaction between human and machine/human and human. In my opinion, this work is more about providing a certain experience for people but not quite taking responses from them to reshape themselves.

Read:

The Veldt: The “nursery” in this fiction seems to be a sort of holographic laser projection but with “all dimensional, superreactionary,
supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens” (4); the fictional function of this device does involve “mind-reading” in the sense that the projection is controlled by its user, the kids’ imagination, and this projection in return gained so much power (from the spirit? the will-power? or the brain wave?) that they became able to erode the reality, as the end of the fiction suggests. my envision of an artifact in this world would be simply a network that collects this power of”imagination” by plugging all these users of “nursery”-like devices to interact with each other (which can drastically change reality and possibly lead to the disastrous outcome as the fiction implies). 

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: This fiction imagines a heaven-like city where people live blissfully at the sacrifice of one child’s grievous suffering. The city is described as an egalitarian (except for the one child) utopia with the highest but non-destructive technology. Just as the fictional drug drooz fits in this Bacchanalian background of the city that elates people spiritually, it is convenient to imagine that they also have a device to help them tamper with their memories in other to suppress the unpleasing knowledge of that suffering child. As an interactive artifact, this device is granted intelligence to the degree of identifying memories that is so unpleasant that people would rather get rid of, but as people make the choice to jettison them, their personalities would change due to the loss of essential feelings and experiences, so do their threshold of different senses (pain, pleasure, etc). This could be likened to the already existing therapy methods like Electroconvulsive therapy which use small electric currents to trigger seizures and change the brain chemistry of people with mental health conditions.

 The Plague: If the virus doesn’t necessarily kill people, but rather just slows down their motions drastically while extending their life as well as their perception of time, I can’t see why there aren’t any people who are willing to be infected and explore how to live in this new form. In this “new world”, people might be able to life with interactive devices that turns all the rigid surfaces into soft materials that won’t cause damages to their bodies.

Task 1:

If you press the button, the speaker will make a sound. There is a power to bring the electricity to the circuit, and there are some electric wires to connect the speaker and the button.

The process of building the circuit: In the beginning, we forgot to connect the power, so we asked the teaching assistant to help us. And then I didn’t realize that I can use the button to cross the line in the middle. I thought there were not enough places for me to connect the electric wire, we then asked the professor for help. Also, I didn’t notice that the breadboard connected transversely in the middle and connected lengthwise in the edge, we found that the circuit doesn’t work, so I checked how the breadboard worked on the IMA website and finally accomplished it.

Task 2

The goal is to build a working switch that could be connected to the circuit we previously built. We were brought to the soldering station, where we started to use pliers to peel off about 2 cm of the electro-insulating rubber off the wires’ both ends.

After the wires are prepped, copper tapes are stuck to the cardboards as the conductor. The next step is soldering, which is also the first time for me and my teammate to solder.  The soldering gun can only be used after reaching the set temperatures, and we tapped the tip of the gun on the connection of solder and wire to melt the solder, allowing the wire to connect with the copper tapes. After they were firmly welded together, the device worked as a switch when electrified. 

Task 3

On the basis of task 2, we had to parallel connect a resistance, a pot and a LED on the circuit. At the beginning, we found that we need more electric wire the connect the things, and there is not enough space for us to do that. So we just tried a lot of times to move the electric wire to make it work. Then we found that the original light and speaker still work but the new LED doesn’t work. We asked the teaching assistant for help, she said we didn’t put the pot into the circuit. After following the guidance of the assistant, we finally finished task 3.

Answers to Questions 

A1: The resistor R1 is used to control the current that passes through the circuit so that they do not get damaged due to overcurrent.

A2:

A3: The author defines interaction as “a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak”; therefore, to talk about interactivity must involve two parties, one makes action and receives its response, which in return affects the next action.  In this sense, I think our work in this session didn’t reach interactivity unless we saw the process of finding errors in the circuit as a kind of interaction (the response that came from the LED influences our build of the circuit).

A4: In Zach Lieberman’s case, Interaction Design and Physical Computing create new meanings for humans to share their unique perceptions of the external sensory world, and in the meantime actively alter the way one another perceives the world. People that cannot paint with their hands in a traditional way can now use their eyes as a new instrument, this technology simultaneously changes the way people paint and the definition of painting itself as a creative process. 

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