Project Title
Ball of Confusion
Our final project is adapted from the well-known video game Super Mario, where players control Mario to gain coins and avoid all kinds of monsters. However, in our project, instead of avoiding, we expect our audience to initially collect the bad stuffs-problems in the world (such as global warming, gap between the rich and the poor, discrimination of gender/race, wars in some developing countries and so on), meaning that when faced with those problems, we exert ourselves to solve them instead of ignoring them. This adaption may be confusing at first for our audience, so that’s why we use “confusion” in our title. Also, I really like Citlaly’s idea of a ball as our character which represents everyone in the world, genderless, sexless, and raceless.
Project Statement of Purpose
As is mentioned above, our project is a Mario-like game, but more than just a game. Nowadays, although the world is developing and improving quickly and as a citizen living in the global village, everything goes well in my life, there’re actually many other people living in hot water every day. Because we don’t live in the same environment as theirs, we can’t always have empathy on them. So our fundamental purpose is to let people know more about the dark side of our globe and inspire them to make a difference to the world. Our targeted audience are all people in the world especially teenagers, who are the hope of the human future.
Project Plan
I and my partner decide to use serial communication in our project, where we attach several vibration sensors to a wooden platform so that when a player jump slightly or stomp heavily, they’ll sense that in Arduino, then send it to processing and show that on the screen at last. So on the screen we can see the circle moving up or down over the wall to catch those bad stuffs. And the important part is that when you catch one, a card will pop up with picture, introduction, data, etc. for you to read. And the moment you catch all of them, a picture of world peace will pop up in the end. We decide to start our work on the coding part this Friday and finish it before user test session. However, I’m worried about it because there’re so many problems, one of them I am thinking of now is that what if the ball fall into the blank space, does it mean “game over”, and the height of one jump and so on. There is a large possibility that we’ll have to give up of our former plans and change it to other things or simplify it, but, anyway, we’ll try our best to do this project.
Context and Significance
My preparatory research and analysis of interaction inspires our proposal a lot. An important part of my definition of interaction is that it shouldn’t be fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different versions. So in this project, we will reduce the limitations which restrain the input or output part compared to my midterm project. Also, after comparing the two projects I found in Youtube(The mood reflecting floor- interaction design project and Arduino-interactive project (origami)), I find that a good purpose is significantly important for a project apart from the aesthetic value, so again, I want to emphasize the humanism connotation in our project, that’s its core and uniqueness.