Group Project Report
1. About the artifact:
The imaginary interactive artifact that our group came up with is a brain helmet sprung from story two The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.We came up with this idea from the circumstance in this story that the pleasure of village Omelas is built on the misery of the boy, which is a relatively logical thinking pattern that sacrifices the minority to satisfy the majority. But this largely harms the boy which neglects the boy’s emotional feelings. This helmet will allow an individual to adjust his or her logical thinking and emotional thinking by adjusting two knobs. For example, you could allow your brain to think at maximum logically or emotionally, or half logically and half emotionally. There are A.I.s and machine learning today which can facilitate logical thinking, but humans still make the final choice. This machine allows humans to adjust between the level of logic and the level of emotions they want based on their circumstances, which to large extent help humans handle with situations difficult to decide on or emergencies smoothly. Also, when it comes to situations related with relationships, this helmet may provide a more decent and appropriate manner to interact with people from different social circles. However, there are problems with this creation. First, if every single human uses logical thinking all the time, we would live in a dystopia. Human creations are beautiful because they have meanings behind them, and being perfectly logical means that you have to be perfectly emotionless. Humans would also lose the ability to think critically by themselves. Using this machine all the time will result in humans not experiencing their own trial and error for mistakes, thus making them faultless with them.
2. My contributions and roles in the group
My job are mainly in producing the artifact and the performance. I measured the exact place of where the ears should be around the base of this helmet, which is a half circle board with curves throughout it. I also came up with the idea that the helmet can be worn by different people with different size of their head so I built a small and short pipe and sticked it on one side of the helmet and a spring that can adjust the size of the helmet to make it suitable for everyone. As the two knobs, I came up with the idea of using two little plates and a tiny axle goes through the board and sticked them together to make it turns and make it more comfortable to wear on in the same time.
Speaking of performance, I played a role in two scenes out of three. The first one is a situation that some one fell accidentally and the person who wears the helmet gives the one who fell a lesson about measuring the possibility of the accident happening and prevent it from happening in advance instead of giving the person a hand to stand up. In this scene, I’m the person who felt annoying about the logical person and forced him to change it into the emotional one and help me stand up. The other scene is about asking out a friend to hang out at night but the person who was previous in the emotional mode asked me to go to a party which I didn’t feel like going, so I switch into the logical mode and that reminded both of us that we still had homework to do first.
(They are my partners Stephen and Kenneth.)
Here are the slides below:
Scene 2
Flora: *trips Freddie*
Freddie: *falls and cries*
Tawan: *puts the helmet on*
*switches the button to the logical side*
*changes attitude*
“Next time you should calculate the possibility of that happening so this wouldn’t happen to you again.”
Freddie: How am I supposed to know what she’s going to do?
Tawan: “There’s a high probability that your friend would prank you, 70% to be precise. Your mental capability is just not high enough to see that coming”.
Freddie: “You know that most people would be helping me instead of lecturing me about what to do right?”
Freddie: “I don’t like you”.
Tawan: *switches the button to the emotional side*
“I’m so sorry bro I don’t know what came over me, you good?”
Freddie: “Yea I’m okay bro, thanks for asking”
Tawan: *holds out his hand to Freddie and helps him get up*
Scene 3
Stephen : *puts the helmet on with the emotional mode*
Freddie: Why don’t we go out tonight?
Stephen: Yay, lez goooo! Where are we going? Clubbing?
Freddie: Yeah, but I really don’t feel like clubbing, maybe dinner?
Stephen: *switches his helmet to the logical side*
Stephen: Yes, that sounds better. We have a lot of interaction lab homework to do. It’s a Wednesday night, Freddie.
Freddie: You’re right, we should finish all of our work today. You are so logical!!
3. Analysis of an artifact from other group
I an impressed by the virus cleaning machine presented by group 4. The machine can detect whether one person has virus or carries it as well through a little detector that can be worn on ones arm and scan the person’s body to complete the detection. Once the machine tell whether the person get infected by the virus, the person then is forced to go through a machine similar to a car washing machine that respectively use some specific liquid and chemicals, light and physical tools to eliminate virus, once the person who tests positive gets out of that machine, the virus is gone and the person get tested again and shows negative. I found this artifact suitable for story three because it is convenient, efficient and effective to test a large amount of people in an area who is infected by the virus and the way to eliminate rock remains on human body is useful. In the meantime, it saves human lives instead of killing them. In their performance, there are three people pretending to be the automatic virus cleaning machine. One people plays the patient and one person plays the person who does the test and controls the machine. The two person is performing well however, the rest three pretending to be the cleaning machine is a bit abstract to understand. They didn’t give a specific point or example of how one part of the machine, for example the light eliminates he virus. As is known to all, virus is extremely small and hard to destroy, that comes another downside of this machine is that it only uses physical and chemical ways outside the body but it can’t get access to the inner part of where the virus exists in the human body. Also, the machine doesn’t have a general structure and look, though it requires too much cardboards and is difficult to built. I think they can come up with simple structure and put all the functional parts on it so that it looks complete.