π©· Title: Barbie AI
π Group members: Ammna Khan, Cassy Hu, Tina Xu, Tianmi Wang, Ting Yang, Vilius Schmidt, Boyan Peng.
π§ββοΈ Concept
The idea was originally from Cassy’s idea of Barbie’s magic wardrobe. This artifact was based on the world in the first story: The Veldt. The world there has super intelligent technology and the characters in the story have a house equipped with all intelligent furniture. Inspired by the people’s problem every day which is choosing our outfit of the day and the recent movie “Barbie”, we came up with the idea of Barbie’s AI dream wardrobe that can help choose your outfit according to the trend, weather, and mood every day.
π Process
We have 3 group meetings in total. Everyone actively joined every meeting and devoted a lot of efforts. We naturally allocated our work and everyone was willing to work and did a good job.
π 1st Group Meeting β 9/18 : Idea Brainstorm
Everyone picked one of our favorite ideas of artifacts that we constructed for the three stories. My favorite idea was a machine that can help me reduce fat and shape muscles. It was later discussed that could be added to the Barbie AI because it helped make a perfect body for showing the charm of the outfit. But we don’t have enough time to realize it.
Then, we voted for the most interactive and creative artifact and improved it. We had a brainstorm and wrote down the questions we had in a shared Google doc. Then, we answered every question together with as many possible answers as we could.
This document contained everything of our artifact.
π 2nd Group Meeting β 9/22: Design and 1/2 of Building
We started to make the prototype relevantly late compared to other groups. At first, we struggled a lot to find the materials because other groups had taken most of them. Luckily, we found a big cardboard box, a huge display board (very neat and complete), and some foam boards. According to the materials we found, we started to design the appearance of the wardrobe.
We used the big cardboard box as the base. We cut off one side of the box to let the user step in more conveniently. Also, we wanted to keep it stand stably, so we connected two sides of the box with one cardboard at the bottom. Then, we planned to glue the display board on the box to make the wardrobe taller. We colored one side of each display board pink to make it more “Barbie”, put it on the shelf, and left it to dry itself for a weekend.
After the building of prototype, I came up with the idea that we should use little cardboard to show the weather and the mood. So I drew the crying emoji and the cloud and Vilius drew the smiling emoji and the sun.
π 3rd Group Meeting β 9/24: 2/2 of Building and Rehearsal
I didn’t joined the building part but I joined the decoration part. I came up with the idea to add some bowknots. I loved what they decorated, especially the fluffy clouds. The drawing of the circuits was also amazing.
Here are the pictures and a video of the decorated wardrobe:
After all the decorations, we started to write the script. Our first very general and brief script is as follows:
We kept improving our script through rehearsal. When we had the rehearsal twice, we started timing. Then, we found out it was a little bit short, so we added some transitions and the beginning and the ending.
π Showcase
Special thanks to Amelia Shao π₯
Retell and interpret the showcase:
At first, Tina, and Vivian had a little girl talk to introduce the little trouble we met every day, which also implied the purpose of the artifact. I raised a question to trigger Tina’s showing the artifact. Then, Tina took us to her house and showed us the Barbie AI. Tina’s father and Tina introduced the Barbie AI to us. As a “bad” friend, like always mocking and picking, I mentioned the practicality. Tina responded to this and further explained it. After the introduction and interpretation, Tina went into the Barbie AI to show how it works. Then, Ammna and Boyan, as part of the Barbie AI, showed the working process. Especially, Ammna used the robot-like voice to interpret how the Barbie AI worked from the perspective of the AI itself, making it fun and understandable. At last, Tina (Cassy) came out with a pretty dress and the Barbie AI rated this outfit on her and detected her mood again to see if she liked this outfit. For the ending, we used the plot that I, Tina and Vivian had a class in a minute and rushed out, which is natural.
π Success
I think our artifact does fit my identification of interaction in my research, which is that βinteractionβ is the action that makes two objects have reciprocal influence. It was especially shown when Tina changed the outfit that the Barbie AI made, AI scanned the mood that Tina had now for this new outfit. It is like a response from the user to the artifact and the response will change how the artifact will work in the future.
To make the performance easier, we picked two of us to play the role of the girl who will change her clothes, so that they don’t need to change clothes on the stage. Tina and Cassy are of the same height and are perfect to be the main characters because they are all English native speakers and extroverts. It turned out to be successful to make this choice. We saved our time and avoided the risk.
For the performance, we picked the form of sitcom to make it easy for the audience to understand what we meant. It was quite successful because I asked one of my friends under the stage and she said it was fun and friendly to the audience. We all have excellent acting skills!
π Failures
We still need to face a lot of problems if this artifact is put into reality, like the unemployment of designers leading to the effects of monopolies and, most importantly, the lack of human fashion creativity. Also, we can improve our performance by showing these issues in it. We only showed how this artifact worked but we didn’t show any of the consequences it would cause.
About the energy question that Professor Andy raised, we talked about this when we had our first meeting. I came up with this question and we had some thoughts about it and wanted to make it fun. My groupmates also considered it a good question. However, we were completely lost in designing and building the artifact and having rehearsals because we started later than others and we didn’t leave much time. We forgot to rethink the brainstorming questions. It was really a pity. We could have presented more interesting ideas.
π Future Improvements
Spare more time to build the artifact! Think about the script more comprehensively!
π€© Peer Feedback on Another Group
Title: DROOZ Visualizer π·
Showcase
Critical analysis and assessment:
Their showcase definitely met the criteria of the assignment well. I really love their design and their performance.
First, my eyes were caught by their artifact. It was so delicate. They have a lot of small parts and they are very good at drawing. I love their painting. I can’t even imagine how much effort they have put into this project.
Also, I love their performance. They had the instrument. I enjoyed this performance not only visually but also audibly.
Besides, I could tell that they had some critical thinking about their artifact from their performance. It had two users. It worked for one but didn’t work for the other one. Nothing is perfect. This part of the performance left the audience a lot of room to imagine, like why didn’t it work for the second user. She didn’t like the saxophone? or she didn’t like how this player played the saxophone?
However, I was thinking that because this was designed in the world of the second story. The users became happy but what about the saxophonist? It was obvious that part of this artifact’s energy source was labor. Is he happy in the box? If there is anything to improve, my suggestion will be that they can add some plots on the saxophonist to show his mood, which may trigger more thinking of this role.