INDIVIDUAL REFLECTION
CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE
When my partner and I were making a specific plan of our project, we referred to the reading “The Art of Interactive Design”. As mentioned, to achieve interactive design, the product should involve the process of input, process and output for each object engaged. Therefore, we were informed that we should stimulate conversations between the audience and our project through our designing. Both sides should engage in the course of “input, process and output” just like in a conversation. The artist team called Time’s Up also offered me inspirations. Their artwork Gravitron aimed to “have people consider ‘their dependence upon biomechanics, control, perception’ and cultural and technological structures that attempt to regulate them”. The deep thought behind their design highly resonated with our intention to put thought-provoking indications into our project. Also, our attempts to have people reflect on what external influence they have long been experiencing but ignored.
I shaped my definition of interaction after obtaining these inspirations, which was to be capable of conveying a message while receiving a message at the same time. Another inspiration was a video (https://m.weibo.cn/5984336074/4311411788665983) edited by a Chinese vlogger named Yue Jing (井越). In his video, he first displayed three separated scenes of a breakfast store, two elderly men playing traditional music in the park and a night club. Then, he mixed them up by altering the background music from each scene. The prototype of our project was then triangulated between his video and Time’s Up’s Gravitron, which was to build up a stage on which people are able to alter the elements freely to create interesting, hilarious or even weird matches. By expansion, we planned to build up a physical product to stress on the interactive function and amplify the effect of mixing up the elements. Moreover, we make elements of music, light and characters more independent from each other to make the indication clearer. When the box is presented to the audience, it is conveying the message that they are able to freely organize the elements provided. After they build up the scene, they take the role of conveying a message of their expectation that how these elements should be arranged. There then exists the conversation between the game-box and the audience.
The purpose of our project is to extract the basic elements from a specific scene so that the audience are able to reorganize them in whatever way they want. Music represents way more than the feeling it can bring about. Same with all the other elements such as the light color and the movements of people around you. These elements are always connected to specific scenes in people’s daily life. For instance, the special ring in Family mart becomes a symbolic piece of music. Similarly, intense music reminds people of clubbing while certain Chinese traditional music makes people recall the parks in China, which are always filled with elderly people playing erhu in the morning. This stereotype of elements in daily life is what we are interested in. We intend to let the audience experience the process of choosing and combining the elements provided to build up the scene. Through this, we draw the attention of the audience to their stereotype of the supposed elements of daily scenes. Our project then provides an opportunity for the audience to explore the possibility of abnormal matches of different elements so that they may get inspiration of how to deal with the implanted stereotype of different objects or people they come across in daily life.
CONCEPTION AND DESIGN
To achieve the freedom of the users as much as possible, we set aside our previous intention to pack up all the elements in one scene and build them up with one single pushbutton. We were alerted to the result that the product might act as a superior informer instead of an equal participator in the interaction. The video about Norman Doors also gave us instructions of making at least the explicit purpose of our product clear to the audience. For example, the pushbuttons should be obvious so that the audience would know what they should do with the product. One specific change we made was about the position of the buttons. They were at the front side of the box before. To make them easier to push and let the audience focus on the stage instead of the buttons, we moved them to both sides of the box. I chose the pushbutton to activate all the circuits. The decision was highly influenced by the video about Norman Doors. I used the similar criteria of designing, which was to make it as clear as possible. Sensors could be another option to activate the circuits, but they would distract the audience from the purpose of the product. More importantly, I intended to give the audience a sense of turning on and off all the parts of the whole scene, so it would be more obvious for them that they were building a scene by adding or cancelling elements.
FABRICATION AND PRODUCTION
In our production process, there were several significant steps we went through.
We first expected to enable the character to orbit by using gears. However, the motor was too weak to run the gears. Therefore, we had to directly connect the motor to the character.
During the User Testing Session, we accepted many suggestions. The most useful suggestion we got was to change the position of our buttons to make them easier to push.
We also got advice on the movements of the characters. Specifically, many users suggested separating the switches for the characters, which means one button for each character. It would take more work, but we still accept this advice to meet the need of the users. We consider providing more buttons as offering more freedom to the users. On the other hand, for those advice we did not adopt, such as lifting up the LEDs to make them look fancier and adding a backdrop to the stage, we thought they less aligned with our basic purpose although they sounded attractive. Also, we modified our designing of the stage for several times, in order to make it bigger and for holding all the circuits and better-looking.
CONCLUSIONS
The goal of our project is to break the daily scene into several elements and give the audience an opportunity to reorganize them. By doing this, we intend to see what kind of stereotype people have regarding the music, different characters and the overall environment. When the users were trying our project, some of them combined the two piece of music we provided by turning on and off the buttons in certain sequence, which was out of our expectation and showed the users’ recreation of it. However, as I reflect on the project, I find that we ourselves have already pre-set the stereotype by providing these elements. Maybe we could give more freedom to the audience and let them decide the elements. Ultimately, there did exist interaction between our project and the audience. If we had more time, we would try to provide more freedom to the audience, maybe by giving them the tool of designing the elements themselves. One important lesson I have learned from the several setbacks that have motivated our modification of our project is that the designers should meet the balance of expressing themselves and putting themselves in the audience’s shoes. The ideal situation is after the audience get interested in the product, they are willing to explore more about the product such as the background story, the hidden meaning or the potential application. Also, through the process of building up our project, I taught myself basic skills of editing music, arranging the circuits in order and so on. I considered these skills as essential for future projects. After the course of designing and redesigning the circuits, I got more proficient in Arduino and the electronics.
When I was planning my project with my partner, I thought further than making a physical thing that would meet the requirement of the professor. I tried to assign deeper meaning to our project. We would be glad to see that our project is able to stimulate others’ thought, even slightly. Our purpose to extract independent elements from reality and motivate the audience to reorganize them can be generalized as an intention to facilitate recreation through creation and to draw people’s attention to the reflection of stereotypes in life.