Tian Qin – IMA Documentation

December 14, 2019December 14, 2019

Project Documentation – Lamb team – Iris

1. Describe your partner

My partner Lamb is a seventeen-year-old girl. She lives in the Putuo district in Shanghai, where is far away from our school. She just graduated from the special school in Putuo last year. She has a disability of controlling her body well because of hypoxia at birth and can only use her right hand but her intelligence is no different from others. She participated in the Hackability in NYUSH this summer and is enthusiastic about this kind of activity. She told me that she posted a video of her participating Hackability on her Weibo. She is an optimistic and outgoing girl. Although she can’t speak fluently and clearly, she is very willing to talk to other people. When we asked some questions about what difficulties or problems they met in daily life, she interrupted her mother and told us that there is a gap between the subway and the ground so that it’s hard for the wheelchair to get on the subway. She is very warmhearted and participates in lots of public service activities. I saw in her mother’s Wechat moment that she donated five boxes of gifts to the blind people. She also visited gerocomium as a volunteer to accompany these elderly people. Although some of her abilities are limited, she tries her best to cheer those who need help and does what she can do.

2. What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?

Lamb’s desire is to go out alone with her electronic wheelchair. One concern is that if she go out by herself and it suddenly rains, it would get her into trouble since she can’t hold an umbrella by herself and she has to control her wheelchair.

Their other main difficulty is transportation. Lamb’s mother told us that their home is far away from the subway station so that she has to push the wheelchair to walk for more than ten minutes to get to the subway station. What’s more, because of the bad weather in Shanghai, there are much high-temperature weather or rainy days. It’s always difficult for them to go out in these weathers. Their other problem is that the buses are almost inaccessible to them because of two reasons. Firstly, it’s hard for the wheelchair-user to get on to the bus because of the stairs. Secondly, in most buses, there is no space for a wheelchair, not to mention facilities that help to fix the wheelchair. They said that if they could take buses, life would be much easier because there are bus stations just near their home. Their difficulty in transportation can be the difficulties of many wheelchair users. This shows that our public facilities should consider more about accessibility to people with disabilities.

3. What is your project?

Our project is an umbrella holder that can be fixed in the wheelchair. Lamb can use it if the weather report said that it might be raining when she goes out with her electronic wheelchair alone. She said she will not go out if it’s raining so that this project is just to in case it rains when she’s outside. Her mother should help her to fix the holder onto the wheelchair and the umbrella to the holder beforehand. After she goes out, if it suddenly rains, she can rotate the holder up and make the joint tighter by spinning a turn-knob. Then open the umbrella by pushing it up. If she is not able to do that, she can ask people around for help. Besides this using, Her mother can also use this to hold the umbrella for Lamb when they go out together. Her mother said that she always wears a raincoat but it’s hard to hold the umbrella for Lamb. Therefore, it would also be useful if they go out together on a rainy day.

4. Development process

In the first week, we came up with the idea to make a unbrella holder which can be rotated by Lamb and the umbrella can be opened by simply pressing a button. We drew a sketch and made a prototype of the umbrella holder by water pipe and cardboard, which perfectly shows what we planned to make.

In the second week, Lamb took a trip to Hangzhou, so that we didn’t meet her. We plan to use an automatic opening and closing umbrella to attach to the umbrella holder so that she can use the umbrella by simply press the button since it’s difficult for Lamb to open the umbrella by herself. When not in usage, the umbrella will be clinging to the handle of the wheelchair. When Lamb needs to use it, she just needs to pull it up and press the button. We planned to use an umbrella-like this in case she will get wet when closing the umbrella. Our challenge was how to fix the umbrella in that position after she pulled it up tightly and to make sure its safety.

In the third week, Lamb got a cold so that she couldn’t come so that we just tested by ourselves without the user. We got the automatic umbrella and the umbrella holder that we bought on Taobao last week. When we tested the automatic umbrella, we found out that the umbrella exerts a large force during the opening and closing process, which may be too dangerous for Lamb.

Also, once the umbrella is opened and closed once, the user has to pull it back to the original position to open it again. But it requires great strength to pull it back. It’s even difficult for me to pull it back. Therefore, we think it’s impossible for Lamb to pull it back by herself. This would cause lots of troubles, for example, if she wants to open it again, it would be hard. Another problem we encountered was that the joint of the holder for rotation is a little complicated, which may be too difficult for Lamb to rotate. We’ll try tomorrow to see if Lamb can rotate it and make it tight enough to hold the umbrella. If she can’t, Young gave us a suggestion that we can try to use a tripod as the joint, which may be easier to operate but also strong.

In the last week, we still didn’t have our partner Lamb since she was still sick. This also raised our awareness that an umbrella is important for her since she will easily get ill if she catches a cold or gets wet in rain. In order to make a joint that is strong enough to hold an umbrella as well as easy to rotate, we tried to use one leg of a gorilla pod as the joint of our holder. We thought the gorilla pod might be strong enough since it can hold a heavy camera. However, the truth is that it’s easy to rotate but too weak to hold an umbrella. Then, we removed half of the gorilla pod joint to make it shorter to make it stronger. Unfortunately, it’s still not strong enough. Therefore, we decided to test on next Tuesday if Lamb can rotate the original turn-knob by herself. If not, she may have to ask other people’s help when using it.

Reflection

This project may not be a success but it’s a special experience. It reminds me of the importance of the user during the designing process. Especially in assistive technology designing, it’s more important to design according to the user’s situation since every user is very different and unique. Without communicating with the user and observing the user, we are not able to know their real needs and empathize, which is the first step in design thinking. Also, we can’t conduct the user test without a user and improve our design, not to mention iterate the process of designing. Therefore, although we didn’t get a chance to test our project with the user and make some improvements according to the user’s feedback, it’s a special learning experience. For example, the automatic umbrella which didn’t work as we expected reminds me of the importance of personalized assistive technology designing. People with disabilities need personalized designing since the products from the assembly line always can’t fit their requirements. This motivates me to make personalized assistive design a lot.

December 8, 2019

Week 6 Project Documentation – Iris

1. Describe Your Partner

My partner Lamb is a seventeen-year-old girl. She lives in the Putuo district in Shanghai, where is far away from our school. She just graduated from the special school in Putuo last year. She has a disability of controlling her body well because of hypoxia at birth, but her intelligence is no different from others. She participated in the Hackability in NYUSH before and is enthusiastic about this kind of activity. She told me that she posted a video of the Hackability on his Weibo. She is an optimistic and outgoing girl. Although she can’t speak fluently, she is very willing to talk to other people. When we asked some questions about what difficulties or problems they met in daily life, she interrupted her mother and told us that there is a gap between the subway and the ground so that it’s hard for the wheelchair to get on the subway. She is very warmhearted and participates in lots of public service activities. I saw in her mother’s Wechat moment that she donated five boxes of gifts to the blind people to try her best to cheer those who need help.

2. What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?

Lamb’s desire is to go out alone with her electronic wheelchair. If she go out by herself and it suddenly rain, it would get her into trouble since she can’t hold an umbrella by herself and she has to control her wheelchair.

Their main difficulty is transportation. Lamb’s mother told us that their home is far away from the subway station so that she has to push the wheelchair to walk for more than ten minutes to get to the station. Another problem is that the buses are almost inaccessible to them because of two reasons. Firstly, it’s hard for the wheelchair-user to get on to the bus because of the stairs. Secondly, in most buses, there is no space for a wheelchair, not to mention facilities that help to fix the wheelchair. The third problem is that Lamb wants to go out by herself alone with her electronic wheelchair, but she can’t if it’s the rainy day because only her right hand has force so that if she holds an umbrella, she can’t control the electronic wheelchair.

3. What is your project?

4. Development Process

This week we still didn’t have our partner Lamb since she got a bad cold. This also raised our awareness than at umbrella is important for her since she will easily get ill if she catches a cold or gets wet in rain. In order to make a joint that is strong enough to hold an umbrella as well as easy to rotate, we tried to use one leg of a gorilla pod as the joint of our holder. We thought the gorilla pod might be strong enough since it can hold a heavy camera. However, the truth is that it’s easy to rotate but too weak to hold a umbrella. Then, we removed half of the gorilla pod joint to make it shorter to make it stronger. Unfortunately, it’s still not strong enough. Therefore, we decided to test on next Tuesday if Lamb can rotate the original turn-knob by herself. If not, she may have to ask other people’s help when using it.

December 8, 2019

Week 6 – Reflection on the Field Trip – Iris

The campus behind Meng Cafe

We observed two club activities and one individual training in this field trip. The first club activity is making a ukulele. The special school invited teachers to their school to hold these workshops. In this class, the teachers were teaching the students how to decorate the ukulele and install the strings to the ukulele. I found out that some students are very willing to talk to us, while some just keep doing the work and keep silence. One little boy from grade nine was trying to catch our attention and talked loudly. I also noticed that a little girl shew hand heart to as when we entered their classroom. I can feel that she is willing to talk to us but she is too shy. I walked close to her when she kept looking at me, and after that, she whispered at my ear that “Can we make friends? I like you so much and you are pretty”. I felt so happy and excited not only because she likes me but also because she took the initiative to talk to me. I learned from Zhang Laoshi that this girl was afraid of talking to others and having eye contact with people before. After the training at the special school, she got better but still didn’t talk to others much. It’s rare for her to talk to someone that she met for the first time. I felt that during this class, besides helping our partner by making a project for him or her, communicating more and making friends with him or her is also an important way to help them.

After that, we went to observe another club activity, which is paper artwork. This activity is held by some volunteers. In this class, the students will keep curving the long scrips of different colors and used them to make artwork. The volunteers said that by doing this kind of repetitive work, these kids can calm down and control their emotions better. In this classroom, we saw lots of artworks made by the kids in this special school and the high quality of these artworks really surprised us.

b. Meng cafe

We pretended to be normal customers when we entered the cafe to observe the employees. There is an employee who is very sensitive to numbers standing at the gate to greet the customers and count the visitors. When greeting us, he naturally guided us to the order desk, which is really professional. When ordering, the cashier was also familiar with everything and asked us if we wanted iced or hot Latte. During the communication, we didn’t feel that she is disabled at all. The employees who make coffee also surprised me since they did the Latte art very well and also tasted good. Some employees are not as professional as others. For example, when I asked one girl to give us some tissue, she just pointed to the front desk and told me I can get tissue there.

We got more information from the communication with Manager Yu and one employee’s mother. We learned that this is the first cafe with disable employees in Shanghai and just opened five months ago, which is still not a mature system. Young told us that there are more than twenty cafes like this in Korea and the first one opened about 13 years ago, which means the development of the workplace for people with disabilities in Shanghai still has a long way to go. But admittedly, it is a promising start since Meng cafe is supported by many people and media. I felt Meng cafe is a cozy community for the employees since Manager Yu treated them like her own children. She required every employee to write a diary every day to check their psychological states. She said that these employees with autism or Down’s syndrome don’t always express their feelings to others, but they will write what they think in the diary so that she can help them to improve their mental health through this way. She also mentioned that although some workplaces also provide some operating posts to disable people, such as Starbucks, they can’t get care and concern that they need in these working places since people around them are all normal people. It would be hard for them to really blend in with other colleagues. Everything is different in Meng cafe. In Meng cafe, their colleagues are also friends with them since they all graduated from Zhonghua vocation school. The customers will also show understanding and sympathy for them since they know the employees are people with disabilities. They have Manager Yu, who treats them like her own children. Meng cafe is a warm and united community, where these special kids can not only get a job and prepare to integrate into society better but also live happily. Another information that Manager Yu told us which stroke my heart is that these kids only have friends in Meng cafe and it’s hard for them to know other people, which means they may only have several friends. Therefore, the same as what I said in the former reflection, we should not only focus on simply making a project for our partner but also communicate with them as a friend.

December 3, 2019

Final Project Proposal – Iris and Qiaowei

Our project is an adaptation of the first and second episodes of a Netflix cartoon series called Hilda. We intersperse some simple games in the story. The story is about Hilda, a fearless blue-haired girl, who lives in a wilderness full of elves, giants, and other magical animals. The whole project is divided into five parts. The first part is the character introductions, which introduce the special creatures in the forest. The second part is a story that Hilda was drawing a troll, which is just a rock with daylight but will become a monster once the sun goes down. She didn’t notice that the troll has awake and started to escape. The user has to keep pressing the space key fast enough to run. Finally, Hilda found out that the troll has no bad faith but to return her sketchbook. The third part is the story that Hilda’s house was attacked by some invisible creatures. She heard someone talking, but can’t see it. The user has to click different parts of the screen to find out that creature. Then, Hilda will find out it’s the tiny elves. They attacked Hilda’s house because Hilda always steps on their house and influence their life. In order to resolve the contradiction, Hilda started the journey to find the king of the elves. In the fourth part, Hilda saw a giant. The user needs to press the space key for a proper time to jump onto the giant to find out his story. Hilda finds out that although the giant looks scary, he also means no harm to other creatures. He is just waiting for his lover. In the final part, Hilda successfully found the king on the mountain, but they encountered some danger since the mountain is actually another giant, who is waiting for the giant I mentioned before. Hilda also reconciled with the elves since she saved their king from the mountain.

Although these stories seem to be cartoons for kids, they are a metaphor showing how can human beings live with other creatures harmoniously without hurting them. In the story, the giants are driven away by people who moved to the forest, which is similar to what we human beings are doing now. People expanded their domain to other creatures’ habitat, expelled them, and even killed them since they influence or endanger our life. However, people didn’t notice that actually human beings are influencing other creatures’ lives. What’s more, people always regard wild animals as dangers and hurt them when they tried to get close to us, just like the situation of the troll chasing Hilda. However, sometimes they mean no harm to us. And the story of tiny elves attacking Hilda’s house also alerts us that not only human beings can control and expel other creatures, other creatures may also drive away humans someday. We will also emphasize the interesting relationships between the giant and human beings as well as human beings and the tiny elves. The same conflict exists between them, which is the inconvenience caused by their very different body sizes, but their relationships end differently. The giants finally left the earth because of the repulsion from human beings, while the tiny elves and human beings finally reconcile and live together.

In this project, we are referencing to the cartoon Hilda, which is created by Luke Pearson, a British cartoonist. We also referenced to some games with stories, such as the mobile game Onmyoji. In this game, the user has to accomplish certain tasks to trigger the next plot. This mode makes the users more engaging in the story because they have a sense of participation since their actions can determine how the story goes. The games also make the user pay more attention when watching the story, which can better convey what we want to express to the users.

For the techniques part, we will mainly use the form of video and comic to develop the storyline. We’ll edit the original videos of Hilda to better fit what we want to show. We’ll also record some Hilda’s voices by ourselves, for example, her self introduction, which is not in the original video but necessary in our project. The challenge would be how to make our voice sound like Hilda. If not, we may need to record all of Hilda’s lines by ourselves. If some parts of the original cartoon are too long, we’ll use comics instead. The plots of the story are complicated and there are lots of characters in the story that the users are not familiar with, especially the special creatures in this cartoon. Therefore, another challenge is how to develop the story clearly to the users in a limited web page. For the games, we will probably use p5js to realize some functions.

December 2, 2019

Week 5 Assignment – Iris

1.Describe your partner

Something new we discovered about our partner Lamb is that she is very warmhearted and participates in lots of public service activities. I saw in her mother’s Wechat moment that she donated five boxes of gifts to the blind people to try her best to cheer those who need help.

2. What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?

3. What is your project?Development process. Include photos and video(s)

Our project would be an umbrella holder that Lamb can rotate by herself. We got the automatic umbrella and the umbrella holder that we bought on Taobao last week. When we tested the automatic umbrella, we found out that the umbrella exert a large force during the opening and closing process, which may be too dangerous for Lamb.

Also, once the umbrella is opened and closed once, the user has to pull it back to the original position to open it again. But it requires great strength to pull it back. It’s even difficult for me to pull it back. Therefore, we think it’s impossible for Lamb to pull it back by herself. This would cause lots of troubles, for example if she want to open it again, it would be hard. Another problem we encountered was that the joint of the holder for rotation is a little complicated, which may be too difficult for Lamb to rotate. We’ll try tomorrow to see if Lamb can rotate it and make it tight enough to hold the umbrella. If she can’t, Young gave us a suggestion that we can try to use a tripod as the joint, which may be easier to operate.

Therefore, for tomorrow, we need to let Lamb try if she is able to rotate and tight the joint and open the umbrella which is attached to the holder with one hand. We also need to measure the size of her wheelchair, the length of her arm, the distance that her hand can reach and her height when sitting on the wheelchair. These data are criticle to make sure our project is safe for Lamb.