Author: Kalkidan Fikadu

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Final Project Intention_Kalkidan Fikadu

Problem

As a student, I used a lot of papers to study and to take exams. Though recent technological innovations have reduced the usage of papers, still papers are abundantly used around the world.  One of the most important fact that is often overlooked is that papers come from trees. And to protect our environment and its resources we must use papers properly and improve our paper recycling systems. The more paper we use our daily life the more paper will be produced. High production of papers has an environmental impact. The intent of this final project is not to discourage using papers, however, to encourage recycling.

Example

For instance, at NYU Shanghai, we use papers every day. We already have paper recycling bins, but except the dully written signs on them, they don’t have anything that distinguishes them from other trash cans.

Solution: enchanted paper collector

For my final project, I want to create trash that can give positive feedback whenever someone puts a paper in it.  Additionally, this trash can will have staple detector and lets the user know if there are any staples in the paper they want to throw. Staples and other metals in a paper document can damage and make the document processing process costly. To solve this issue we can divide the trash can into two sections:  metal free and with metal. 

Other feedback mechanisms we can use

    • Trashcan says thank you
    • Trashcan collects users information and ranks the best recyclers
    • happy and sad faces
    • the trashcan’s color changes based on the number of staples in the paper

More information on staple/ detector technology (to prove the existence of the technology)

Wizard staple detector 

https://wizarddistribution.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_ID=3280#.XMZkfZMzZDU

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Speculative Design- Commercial Drone Laws / Kalkidan Fikadu

Commercial drone laws :

What will happen in the next 10 years?

    • Very obvious Drone disasters will decrease drastically compared to the time FAA laws were passed.
    • Based on new conditions more safety regulation will be introduced
    • job creation –
      • drone professionals/pilots
      • separate drone traffic policing or monitoring government organizations will be established
      • more drone pilot training companies
    • Drone-related crimes will rise since low-flying drones are harder to detect
    • Drone pilots will be required to use only specific kinds of apps for flying drones and other mental health screenings,  to ensure safety and drone regulation easier.
    • More no-go zones will be introduced
    • Big companies will dominate the commercial market

Render possible scenarios that would come about

The commercial side of drone flight market will be dominated by big cooperate companies. Big companies will have a resource to hire a more human resource to keep up with government regulations. For instance, the government requires only professionals to fly drones, that means startups that use drones will have to hire extra manpower. If by accident small or startup companies violate drone laws they might be fined a large sum of money and run out of business. Whereas, similar fines might not affect the operation of large cooperate companies.

Solve the problem by  designing objects or systems

    • A possible solution can be developing an area specific drone.
    • AI technology is  cost-effective. The more information and data we input into an AI system, the more it operates effectively,  without failures and human-related errors. Hence my training AI drone we can reduce the chance of crush.
    • What makes an area specific AI drones different from other drones is that, before beginning operation, the drone will be trained by professionals to be very familiar with the surrounding of a particular area. Additionally, in order to guarantee safe drone usage, drone flights can be limited inside an area/ or become area specific.
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Tiny Habit: Kalkidan Fikadu

The browser I use most is chrome. Usually, whenever I am googling about a topic, I find myself opening too many tabs. I don’t want to close my opened tabs, even the least used ones. Opened-tabs give me a sense of progress. Though I can check the browser history to see my recent visited pages, I prefer to keep the tabs open. 

I also hate seeing too many tabs open on the browser window. When the browser window gets too full, instead of closing the old unused tabs, I just open a new window. I even keep old tabs for over a week. This also lowers the performance of my laptop.

Since I spend a lot of time on my browser though out the day, my motivation is to create a clean and simple browser environment. I want to keep the number of tabs on my browser as few as possible. For instance, not opening more than one pages of the same website, like Youtube can help fix the problem. The second solution I came up with is, creating a fixed number of tabs and assigning each of them a specific task. For example every morning I will create 5 tabs on a browser, I will use (1) googling (2) Gmail (3) new classes, (4) Youtube and I will keep the last one for flexibility.

While I was writing this,  I found a chrome extension called tab suspender that removes unused tabs after some idle amount of time.  I have added the extension to my browser and chosen the suspender to close my tabs after 30mins. The extension also looks for most rarely used and forgotten tabs and close them automatically.  This extension helps to save memory and CPU usage. Writing about this tiny habit has helped me come up with this solution. Thank you.

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Reflection: Enchanted Objects – Design Human Desire and the Internet of Things by David Ross – Kalkidan Fikadu

Enchanted objects as their given name suggests are objects with extraordinary capabilities. The difference between these objects and objects we read about in fantasy novels is that enchanted objects are ordinary objects with additional technological improvement. Ross in his talk mentions that enchanted objects are designed to be visually attractive, with big eyes and child like features. Most enchanted objects give feedbacks as output. For Instance, a house power controller designed to turn red when the power consumption of a house reaches the maximum, trains residents of the house to be cautious of their increasing consumption of energy. I think enchanted objects can be very useful to train ourselves to act in a certain way at certain times. The more training we get, the more our actions become thoughtless and effortless. A person who turns off the light after getting negative feedback from a power controller, after some training, will have a sense of “knowledge” about his/her energy consumption. When watching the video, one question that came to my mind was: can enchanted objects be used for behavioral conditioning or learning? After all, most of enchanted objects implementations are based on a reaction/response to stimuli.

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Reading Reflection – Thoughtless Act, Affordance and Constraint

Thoughtless Act:  explores the concepts that everyone is a designer in their day to day activities and interactions. The professional designer also seeks inspirations from day-to-day activities.  From reading this I have understood that every design is made with the aim to make our life easier and better. As we’ve discussed in class our mind can handle a limited amount of cognitive load, and thinking about these seemingly small thoughtless acts only increases that load. Hence we can answer the author’s question “what motivates thoughtless behavior? “,  by linking it to human’s nature which favors reducing mental effort in order to create space for other problems and thoughts. I agree that sometimes “simple is better”. Simple objects and simple solutions don’t require time and extra effort to understand, similar to warming hands on a mug doesn’t require processing thoughts. After reading the article I have been thinking about if there’s a relation between daily routines and thoughtless acts.

Affordance Convention and Design: this piece by Donald Norman discussed the relationship between the appearance of a device and clues requires for its operation. Norman argues understanding how to operate a novel device has three dimensions: formulating appropriate conceptual models, constraints and affordances. He also claimes affordance hasn’t been completely understood by the design community.  I think the subtle difference between perceived affordance and real affordance is very essential in the design process. Perceived affordance has a priority over real affordances because at the end of the day in designed products what matters more is what the user perceives to be possible. As examples, Norman mentions a display screen that doesn’t have touch-sensitivity but “affords touching” and screens that “affords clicking”. He argues designing a target button on the later screen is a perceived affordance because it only provides a visual aid for users who want to click. Whereas defining “clickable” regions is a real affordance because it allows the designer to increase or decrease the affordance region. 

Physical constraints are related to real affordances and logical constraints are valuable in guiding behavior. The final goal of any design should be to make affordances and constraints as visually clear and intuitive as possible.