NTERACTION LAB
BLOG POST SPRING 19
PROJECT TITLE – NAME – INSTRUCTOR’S NAME
You’ll NEVER catch me Mom! – Rujun Zhang — Marcela
INDIVIDUAL REFLECTION:
- CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE
Our project describes a kid makes a device which can warn him that his Mom is coming, and his aim is that he can play video games in midnight without being caught by his mom. If the device detects Mom is coming, then all electronic equipment in kid’s room will be shut down. The inspiration came from my own experience because I was always being caught by my Mom when I was playing games at night in my childhood.
After I read the article named “Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen”, I have the initial inspiration about our project: “Interaction…is just the beginning of a conversation with the people who experience your work”. I realized that if people need to experience our ideas from our projects, then it might be a good idea that our projects came from a real experience in people’s lives. According to The Art of Interactive Design, the interaction projects are “cyclic process between two actors” and interestingly, I found two kinds of interactions in our projects: Our projects were patterns of real-life experiences, so on one side, users need to interact with our models, which means every action made by users will cause a reaction from our projects. On the other side, two actors in our model have connections and interactions. My understanding of interactions is that there are some connections between two actors. Each one’s sounds, movements and so on can give an information to another to make sure another actor can give a feedback. After finishing this project, I realized that interactions may happened in different dimensions. In other words, in the past I thought interactions are cyclic processes but now I think interactions may happen with the form of spherical processes because the projects and people, the actors in the projects can have interactions at the same time and one circle can not describe such complex relationship.
- CONCEPTION AND DESIGN:
In my understanding, first of all, from the sentences on the screen and the house model we made, users can understand the story of our project. But one interesting thing is users’ mental experience come from kid’s side, but they control the “Mom” in our project. They use a handlebar to control “the Mom” to walk towards kid’s room. Once “the Mom” approaches kid’s room, the sounds of game music, the screen of computer model and the light of the room will be shut off immediately. But if users control “the Mom” goes back, and then all the lights will be turned on again.
We use light sensor to detect the motions of Mom because we suggested that there will be a night light in the corridor, so if Mom passed the corridor, the output of light sensor will definitely change. At the beginning, we considered about use infrared receiver to detects the motions of Mom but we gave up soon because we had no ideas of how to use it. On the other side, we also thought that the combination of light sensor and night light makes more sense in real life. We use LEDs to imitate the light of screen and lamp of the house. In fact, it is better to use a small bulb or a stronger LED as the lamp of the house. Unfortunately, the studio office ran out of all the big LEDs. We use tissues to make bed because we had no time to use 3D printer to print two bed. In our first project, we use stepper motor to present two actors’ words but in our final we use Serials and print the words on the screen. We considered that the speed of stepper motor is limited in some degree and it cannot carry to many words. And we used servo to control the movement of kids and I think it was the best choices because the changing angle was only 90 degree and servo is relatively small.
- FABRICATION AND PRODUCTION:
In this section, describe and assess the most significant steps in your production process, both in terms of failures and successes. What happened during the User Testing Session? How did your user testing process influence some of your following production decisions? What kind of adaptations did you make? Were they effective? In short, keeping in mind your project goals, how do your account for and justify the various production choices you made for your project? Include sketches and drawings.
Because one of my responsibilities was writing all the code and connect most of circuits, the most significant steps in our processes was designing state machine in coding. In our user test, every time users moved “the Mom”, we had to use reset button on Arduinos to restart, which was really inconvenient and made users confused sometimes. When I considered how to realize making the whole project an entire loop, I found that it may need the concept “state machine” that I learned in the ICS. We need to think about how many states that our program needed and in what condition the state will change. In our state machine, the first state is that “the Mom” stays in her room and if the light sensor’s value changes, it will go to stage 2. Totally, I wrote four states to describe the whole process and I added a lot of conditional parameters which had no real meaning but to help me to control the change of states. I found this very difficult because there were a lot to consider. For example, at the beginning of writing state machine, I only considered two states. However, I ignored that Mom’s model needs some time to pass the light sensor, so if we just had two states, this was no way to judge the situation that “Mom is passing through the light sensor”. After a long time, I used four states to solve this problem but there was still a failure in our project: if “the Mom” is detected by light sensor but “the Mom” goes back to her mom instead of the kid’s room, then our state machine will have a problem and we called this a system error. To solve this problem, we need one more sensor and more states, but we had no time to solve it because this bug was discovered on Monday night. So, I think we solved one of the biggest problems found in users test, but to solve this problem, we found one more system error. Another problem we met in users test was that people could not understand our story but after we used laser cut to make a house and used screen to print the words, almost all the people can understand what it is going on in our project.
- CONCLUSIONS:
The initial goal of our project is creating a device for kids to help them avoid being caught by their parents and this idea came from my own experience. After doing the whole process, I consider that using light device to detect the motion of people can be used for more purpose. Not only for people who want to avoid being caught by something, but also for people who want to have previous information before someone is coming. In the real life, the interactions should be the automatic lights and devices and the reactions for users. In our pattern and model, interactions happen between the actors in the model and the users and our project. We made a “spherical processes” in our project to make connections between all the “actors”. During the interactions in our project, we supposed that users can understand the story of our project and understand how it can happen in real life. We believed that users of our final projects can satisfied our goals. A lot of students said our design could met their need in their childhood. However, some of them triggered the bug I have mentioned and then the kid in the model was caught by “the Mom” and this reminded me of designing interactions was not easy because we needed a whole image for all possible inputs and outputs. If we had more time, we were going to use two sensors and add more states to fix the bug and system error in our project. At present, we could not use laser cut and 3D printer expertly, so some models in our project were very ugly, such as the doors and beds. With more time, we can use two machines to build a better model to tell a better story of our project. From our failures that we made a bug, I understand before we made our project, we need to design it carefully. In this project, our plan was made the project, found problems and then fixed it. Our efficiency was very low, so in the future, we should have a whole picture and a relatively complete plans in the beginning, which can avoid such system error and bug in some degree.