Project Title
Foresters
Project Statement of Purpose
With the development of mobile technologies, smartphones bring us convenience but also troubles. “Cell phone addiction” has become a social issue that affects a significant amount of young people to varying degrees. There are two major negative effects. First, people get distracted from work easily and procrastinate a lot. Second, face-to-face communication greatly reduced. And these are the two problems that my project intends to address on and people who have these problems are my target audiences.
Project Plan
First, to solve the problem of hard to concentrate, I’m planning to make a box or merely a piece of board and install sensors to detect whether there is a phone or not. So users can simply put their phone aside before starting to work and a tree will automatically be planted. The tree will be shown on Processing and it will be a “living” tree that slowly grows over time, and dies if the phone is taken away. I also want to add a function to detect phone calls. For now, I’m planning to use a vibration sensor to achieve that. So if users have turned on vibration mode, every time they get a phone call, tree leaves will shake to let them know someone is calling, and the tree won’t die if users take out their phone at this time.
The project will also be able to be used by multiple users at the same time. For example, if there are two boxes and users put phones separately in them, then two trees will show on the screen. Moreover, users can also choose to put phones in the same box, then the tree will grow faster. Users can compete and cooperate depend on their choices. And I think it will encourage people to put down their phones and communicate, especially in scenarios like eating in a restaurant.
The more complicated part of my project is to write the code to draw the tree and achieve these functions. So I will put more effort into that. I will decide on the appearance of the tree, write the code and test on sensors in the next two weeks. Then in the third week, I will put everything together to build the final product and user test with my friends.
Context and Significance
During my preparatory research, I found a project named “Connected tools – Devices that mediate smartphone consumption”. As I mentioned in my previous post, the main goal of the project is to reduce the time people spend on mobile phones, and three tools were designed to help people achieve that. The project was categorized as “project that does not align with my definition of interaction” because its level of interaction is low. However, I found the idea “mediate smartphone consumption” inspiring and decided to develop upon that.
Apart from “Connected tools”, I also gained inspirations from an app called “focus forest”. The app is designed to help people concentrate while working. Users can open the app and plant a tree when they start to work, and if they quit the app before the set time, the tree will die. The app is interesting and useful, but I also found it sometimes inconvenient, as users have to unlock their phones, open the app, pick a tree, and then start to work. So I decided to take the idea of tree growing, combine it with the previous project, and enhance its interactivity.
I think my project aligns with my definition of interaction because first of all it takes input, processes and gives output. And the process is cyclic, users and the device take turns to react, depending on the situation. The tree grows and dies based on users’ acts of putting down and taking away their phones, while users also respond accordingly to the tree’s signs. Moreover, the interaction here not only happens between human and machine but also among humans and between machines themselves. The device responds to the phone’s vibrations, and users interact with each other.