Author: Ziying Wang

I look into the Empathy Toy from 21 toys in my research for the empathy workshop. In their description video, they demonstrate the rule of the toy. It’s a game of two, both players are required to cover their eyes when playing, one plays the role as a commander and has an already assembled piece of the juggle. The other is required to assemble the same piece of juggle according to only to the first player’s verbal instruction. By playing this toy, the players learn to work with others better. I think empathy is an important virtue in teamwork when Echo and I are working on our final project and also in my experience when working on the group project, the first thing we need to achieve is to understand each other, there can’t be chaos inside a team.

Echo showed me the suggestion that was made by Gabriel during Monday’s class. I find lots of his suggestions extremely helpful, even though some changes he thinks of might not be applied on our prototype, his suggestions help me rethink many design choices I made in the first place, and I modified some of my plans accordingly. A suggestion we decide to apply to our product is adding an AI system on our WatchPad. Even though we were afraid that sound may affect the user when he/she is gaming, we forget that our product should also be multi-functional when the user isn’t gaming, therefore we decide to add an AI function for the none-gaming mode and deactivate it when the user is gaming.

website link: https://zw1745.wixsite.com/website

video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiXDyUKJLHo

Framework: Speculative Design

Agenda: Responsible Agenda

Goal: Performance

For our group project, we are designing a speculative design that will make an impact on the future. Our goal is to improve the performance of a now-existing thing and our agenda is a responsible agenda which is to solve a problem.

We started by defining a problem we’d like to solve and a scenario that needs to be improved. Recently, there’s a piece of news on Github about programmers working length. “996” represents their weekly working routine: start working at 9 am, end working at 9 pm, work for 6 days a week. Currently, this movement of a petition for less working pressure is only performed by programmers reporting the companies that have this situation going on and they are hoping for laws or policies to improve this situation.

However, we don’t think this petition for better policies will actually make a difference in this situation. In a way, policies are made to be broken, in situations like this, it is not the managers making these programmers stay long hours after work, it’s always because the work distribution is not reasonable, and the peer pressure among workers. When some of them are finishing more works than others, the invisible competitions between workers start, and it increases peer pressure little by little. Therefore, we decide to design a SmartWork system to improve this situation by adopting our office equipment into future offices, these equipment are specially designed for keeping track of the workers’ working pressure and their amount of quality work, in this case, both the managers and the workers can receive benefits: the workers will be made sure that their working pressure isn’t above a certain value, the managers can have an eye on the working efficiency of their workers and therefore obtain higher quality works.

When designing our products for the future office, we separated our designs into two parts, one for the workers and the other for the managers. For the workers, we want to make sure that their working pressure doesn’t go beyond a certain level, but also they are obliged to produce a certain amount of quality work per day before they can leave work. Therefore, we design a detecting system that is assembled within the workers’ webcam, which is called “Smartcam”, it monitors the stress level and concentration level of the worker through capturing the movement of the workers’ facial muscles and calculating the values, it sends the concentration values back to the SmartChair as an indicator of the amount of quality work the worker has finished, the stress level is sent to the SmartLight which is designed for the manager. These two products will be discussed later.

SmartChair is an improved version of nowadays’ office chairs, it comes with SmartCam and receives the data feedback from the SmartCam. According to the concentration level which represents the length of productive work time the worker has contributed, the LED on the back of SmartChair will slowly turn brighter. When the worker reaches the amount of required concentrating hours per day, the LED will blink and the worker can leave work. The LED wouldn’t turn bright if the worker isn’t working for SmartCam will detect his facial movement.

SmartLight is a monitor designed for the manager to check on the workers’ working pressure. If the average working pressure of the workers is in the warning zone, which is too high, the manager will tell the worker to take a break or the company will get fined. The levels of working pressure are indicated with four different colors: green, yellow, orange and red. The redder the light turns, the higher the average stress level of the worker is.

Limited by the technology of detecting facial muscle movement and concentration level, while prototyping, we can’t really program the SmartCam out. To demonstrate our idea, we decided to film a video of the demonstration of our three products. Peter programmed the LED for the SmartChair, the light is programmed to turn brighter with time and flicker when it reaches a certain intensity value. Zeyao used p5 and programmed our SmartLight screen with each color block indicating a worker and a value bar on the bottom implying the average stress level. I created a website with descriptions of our products and made a video demonstration of the products.

With Zeyao as the worker, I had Peter remain the intensity of the LED for a while to film the condition of the LED light when the worker isn’t working. Zeyao was on his phone scrolling through Instagram pages and the LED remains the same intensity as the SmartCam detects that he isn’t concentrating at that moment. Then I asked Zeyao to put down the phone and start working, with Peter changing his program to the light getting brighter and flickers by the end when Zeyao leaves work. I filmed this as an indicator for the SmartChair has the function of telling the worker he can leave work when the concentration-time reaches a certain amount of hours. For SmartLight, I asked Peter to be the manager who was working on his laptop when suddenly heard an alert from SmartLight informing him that the average stress level of his workers is very high, I focused on the red bar and filmed Peter going to Zeyao to tell him to take a break from work. When editing the clips, I did a brief voiceover to explain the functions of our products.

Looking back at our group project, I think we fulfilled the framework of speculative design since this is an office set designed for future offices since some technologies like stress level and concentration detecting systems are not yet invented. And we completed the aim of improving performances and the responsible agenda by solving a now-existing problem “996” and providing it with a solution of applying a better office set.

However, I think we are lacking descriptions of the target audiences. This office set is, in a way, freeing the workers from disorganized working hours but in another way, monitoring their brains. Whether the companies would like to buy this office system can become a problem. Additionally, we can’t make sure the worker is working through simply checking on concentration level, he can be concentrating on something else other than his works and can still be counted as concentrating. These are the problems we need to fix if given more time.

(Drawings: Zeyao & Jennifer; Arduino coding: Peter; p5: Zeyao; Website: Jamie & Jennifer; Video: Jamie)

Gamers, when they are gaming, it’s critical for them to be aware of the conditions of their computers, which may drastically influence their gaming performances. Changes in CPU temperature and ping speed which would affect the frame count of the game may lead to different gaming decisions. In a traditional gaming interface, the data of CPU temperature and ping speed is usually written in the top-left corner, which is nearly impossible for a gamer to notice when he is fully involved in a game. Therefore, we decide to design an attached pad that reports live data in the form of color changing with other functions as well.

I photoshopped this WatchPad prototype and the color range it would cover.

Watchpad is a product that can stand next to your screen while gaming. After plugging into your pc, the screen is automatically turned on, it consists of only two pages, one is for displaying simple information including date, memos, some photos. The other page is the gaming mode page which only has two sections: the upper part detects the ping speed which would affect the fps; the lower part displays the CPU temperature. Both sections will have specific data within the section, but more importantly, both indexes are also implied through color changes. Red and blue are the two colors that contrast greatly and would be an apparent alarm for the gamer. We design the red as the danger zone and the blue as the normal zone. For ping speed, the redder the section gets, the slower your net speed is; for CPU temperature, the redder, the hotter. WatchPad is designed to be constantly muted so that there won’t be noises that may affect the gamer.

For laptop users, since laptop lacks advanced cooling system, most laptop gamers purchase extra fans that are placed under the laptop to cool down the system, because of the noise the fans make, they are not always on and the player has to manually switch them on. Therefore, our WatchPad has an additional cable that can be linked to the external fans, when the CPU temperature reaches a certain level, WatchPad will automatically switch on the fans and switch them off when the temperature goes down.

Our inspiration comes from a friend who is a professional gamer in Overwatch. He complains about the trouble he encounters when gaming and we hope to solve this problem with our design. It should be categorized as an enchanted object since it is an upgrade for traditional gaming equipment. It fulfills the responsible design agenda as for solving a problem for gamers and achieves the problem-solving goal.

This workshop was a new experience for me. We make our customers cats, which means we are designing products for cats. We started by thinking about what are some problems cats are facing. In my group, we thought about communications, especially for home cats who are taken care of by their human owners. Those cats can’t communicate with their owners, even though there are daily feeding routines, they might be hungry at times or wanting companies or getting bathed.

After writing down this question, we were asked to switch to another desk to solve the problem others raised about cats. The problem to be solved was to reduce the number of stray cats. Originally we could only think of shelters, but then we expand our sights by thinking what actually happens to stray cats since there are already animal shelters and building more of them isn’t a possible solution for our society. We turned to the stray cats who often live in parking lots. Those cats are easily run over by cars since they always hide on the tires, under the car body and is not easily spotted by car owners. Therefore, we designed a monitoring system that can monitor if there are obstacles under the car, or between the car body with the tire.

Finally, we switched to the third table to prototype the solution raised by the former group, they thought of a cat feeding machine that wouldn’t need to be cleaned often. We decided that the reason for owners having to keep washing the food bowl is because of the saliva stuck on the bowl. We started to sculpt our cat feeding machine that has the food bowl on the top of the water bowl, the food bowl has tiny holes on the wall that allows the saliva leaks through the wall into the water bowl, this design allows the owner to only wash the water bowl and will vastly reduce the washing times.

In the 6 hats workshop, we learned how to raise a solution, evaluate the solution, and judge the process. The 6 colors of the 6 hats represent different roles in problem-solving. Normally when we consider problem-solving, we just think of the question, analyze our scenario, generated some ideas and consider problem solved. However, we are only performing 3 roles among all 6 in hats thinking process. The three roles we are missing are evaluating the benefit, the drawbacks, and analyzing feelings of people. They play critical roles and shouldn’t be ignored.

In the workshop we did, I was in the black hat group, which was to display the drawbacks of the solutions provided by the green team. It’s not an easy task because members of the green team themselves have done careful analysis already. Especially when the red team raised their positive judgments on the solutions, our mission becomes even harder. However, through Eric’s example, we learned to analyze the solutions not just from the solution, but from the essence of the overall problem. Eric claims that he needs to meditate, yet he never has time for it. We decided to start from the reason why he needs to meditate, does he really needs it. Because if it’s essential for him, he must have intentionally saved time for doing it.

Sometimes different roles in the 6 hats help us view the problem from different angles. Red hat, which stands for analyzing feelings, also plays an important role. We sometimes ignore the subject’s feeling when we are providing him with our solution. Would our perfectly designed solution fulfill our customer’s feelings? Is it something that can be accepted or want to be accepted. These are all elements to be considered in problem-solving.