Author: Xincheng Huang

Nuraphones

The nuraphone is a fascinating product that can adapt to your ears. Whenever you put it on, it can analyze your hearing by the very faint sound your ear returns, and then build a sound profile for you. (ref. https://www.nuraphone.com/pages/how-it-works). After that, it can play music in a way, perhaps by adjusting the tones, amplitude, and frequency, to make it best suitable for your hearing.

Future Implications and Scenarios

Such technology of analyzing ears is so magical, but it can compromise people’s privacy. Each person’s ear profile is unique, so it provides a potential way to identify people, or even locate people. Also, for people who have bad hearing abilities, this could also lead to discriminations. For instance, in the job market, this can be a new standard for entering certain locations. Imaging one day, we can invent a device that can analyze people’s sound profile from a larger distance, such as several meters or more (see sketch below). In this way, people can be easily identified or even located. This leads to a leak of privacy and has the potential for censorship and surveillance.

Possible Solutions

Personally, I think that the problems identified above are relatively hard to solve. Therefore might be two ways. First, for companies such as Nura, they should make sure that all the sound profiles are kept as a secret. Secondly, one potential technological way is to add a sound filter between the sound collector and the algorithm that analyzes the sound (as shown in the following sketch). In this way, each time the sound profile of the person will be slightly different (but should maintain significant characteristics for sound analyzation). The concept of this is shown in the sketch below.

Reflection

In my opinion, the development of big data and machine learning algorithms always involve the tradeoff between convenience and privacy. Currently, in China, the trend is that people tend to pursue convenience without considering much about their privacy. Personally, I think although it might be a good trend in terms of encouraging the development of AI, it could lead to serious problems one day when all our privacy are compromised by these data collecting companies and government surveillance.

What and Why Design

In this project, I am designing a time management product for mainly myself, and anyone who suffers from a similar issue of procrastinating and wasting time. The reason why I am designing this product is that I keeping myself focused and concentrated while working is usually not an easy task for me, and most time management tool or timer does not solve this problem for me well.

Design Framework

• Persuasive Design: Avoid distraction and procrastination, and encourage concentration while working
• Enchanted Object: An enchanted timer to your laptop
• Performance Goal: Improve and add multi-functionality to current timers

Design Process

I conducted the design process by finding out and understanding the facts about my own working style as well as the design strategy of some other products, and I am listing them as the following:

– Facts about the client (i.e. me)

• Easily distracted (Zhihu, Youtube, etc.)
• Go away from the laptop (get water, daydreaming, take a nap)
• Start working is harder than keep working

– Facts about the existing apps (e.g. tomato clocks)

• Fixed tomato time: always 30 mins
• False fulfillment: celebrate for you even if you took a nap. Not able to tell whether you actually spend the time working or doing nothing.
• Is itself a distraction: the ticking noise and the constant display showing how much time is left
• Need to set up for each task
• Unnatural timing strategy: imposes the idea that people work by a 30 min of working + 5 min of the rest cycle

My design and the design choices

Based on all the information above, I decided to create a device that does the following:

• Reflects the actual amount of time spent working
• Allows a natural working style with random rests from time to time, but forces the user to make such time up.
• Provides triggers for working and celebrates work done.
• Blocks access to the websites that distract me the most

To achieve the goals and functions as stated above,  the following are several key design choices that I made.

• Use a shining and unsettling red light as the trigger for start working
• Celebrates the work done by generating a pleasant blue light
• The device detects working by monitoring mouse movements and keyboard typing.
• The light’s color and numbers accumulate when the user is working and decreases when the user is not being productive, thus encouraging the user to work more and idle less.
• Calls up a third-party software that can block access to given websites
• Designed a new timing strategy:
  • Timing according to the time I would like to work and how efficient I would like to be (i.e. laziness)
  • The speed of lights increasing or decreasing is based on the above two parameters. Therefore, it will allow me to idle by sacrificing the number of lights that I have accumulated.
  • In general, we have the following equation:
    • NumOfLights/intensity = Time working – Time idling
    • In this way, the NumOfLights/intensity only reflects the actual amount of time spent working.

Refection

Based on the feedback that I received, the project is successful in terms of making goofing around hard. However, the most significant concern about the outcome of my project is whether using lights provides enough motivation to work. On the one hand, I agree that different people can be motivated in different ways, and I also confess that I am not entirely sure whether using lights as motivation will be a long-lasting strategy for myself. Therefore, it is true that more motivation strategy should be explored to improve my project. On the other hand, personally, I believe that the lack of a strong concentration motivation can be somewhat compensated by the increased difficulty to idle.

Apart from the current design itself, it is also interesting to consider the future forms of the device. In this way, we can explore its potential of scaling up, and fit into a commercial agenda. For instance, it can be embedded into the laptop or a laptop case. Meanwhile, such a design can be extended to other digital devices, such as an Ipad of a phone. 

Demo

The first phase of this Final Project ideation session was an empathy workshop. This is a very interesting workshop that challenges our ability to empathize with each other. We had to do is to have one student explaining to another student how to build a complex structure of lego blocks, but with our eyes folded. 

It is hard to say that I and my partner did the session very successfully.  In general, our outcome structure was pretty messy. However, we did learn a lot about communicating with each other during the process. I feel that the essence is to synchronize each other’s mindset and reach a consensus on how to convey our ideas. For instance, after breaking our structure once, we discussed how to name each block and depict their characteristics.

After the empathy workshop, we proceed to a final project ideation session.  The main focus my partner had for me was about how to make the project applicable for more use cases and user groups. My project, a pen with a timing functionality, starts as a personal project. However, it is true that it could be better if I can give more functions to it.

The first idea for extending the using scenario for my project was to make it usable for people who read and write digitally. The first use case would be an iPad pen. Through research, we find that there are many products that make a pen both writable on a paper, and on a digital device such as an iPad. Moreover, we can build a stand or a clip with the pen so that it can be attached to an electronic device as a timer. For example, when attached on a laptop, it will start timing once we turn on our laptop.

A second concern we thought of is how the pen will be charged. The ideas we thought of include, a pluggable pen, a charging stand, and a pen powered by solar energy. Personally, I think that a pen powered by solar energy sounds like an interesting idea since that would keep it natural to use the pen. Meanwhile, I think to build a small charging stand is also a possible idea, as when we put the pen on the charging stand, it would still be a useful timer.

The third interesting idea we came across was to build software around it so that it will become a more commercial product. For instance, we can use an app to keep track of the tasks the user has done with the pen and give a various status of his or her pen usage such as writing/resting ratio or the longest continuous working time, etc.

I think all above are very interesting ideas, so addition to building a prototype that has all the basic functions that I originally planned, I will also show some of these functions as a part of the design in the video demo.

In this workshop, we go through a very interesting design process by designing and prototyping each other’s idea. The clients for whom we are designing is cats. The problem we planned to solve was to design a product that can help communication between cats and their owners. Personally, I agree that it is a very hard idea. When I was trying to think of what I would do for this project, I thought that we can train the cats to use color to convey their thoughts, such as whether they are hungry, tired, sad or happy.

After that, the problem we were trying to solve was to keep cats warm and fed. We first further restrict the problem to stray cats because these cats need to get warm and fed the most. Then, we emphasized with the stray cats and realized that most of them tend to hide under a car to get warmer. Therefore, we designed a device that can be equipped in a car to warm the cat when it senses that there is a cat there. Meanwhile, it solves the problem of car owners accidentally having their cars run over the cats by signaling there is a cat. Personally, I think this is a brilliant design because we are actually emphasizing with the cat and solve the problem with the enchanted object framework.

At last, the product we were prototyping was an automatic food cleaner for a cat. The design was that it would somehow separate the dry food and the wet food and clean the residue of wet food automatically. I think it was a practical design, but I feel that the design is too common. By researching, there are many similar products already. Meanwhile, the prototype we made looked quite strange, which might have some risk of intimidating the cats.