Research Project Presentation documentation by Linhui Wu

Name: Linhui Wu 

Instructor: Marcela 

Date: 8 March 

Definition of Interaction

Interaction is a way that realizes the mutual communication between at least two organisms and helps each organism to understand each other. The forms of interaction can be multiple, and they can be sound, touch, language, even emotions but the reciprocal process involves several basic steps, receiving the information, giving feedback or reflections, analyzing and making actions.

As the author stated in “what exactly is the interactivity?”, “I’m using the terms actors, listen, think, and speak metaphorically, although the terms are literal to the most commonly experienced form of interactivity.” This process should be a sustainable and effective loop. O’Sullivan and Igoe conclude the process of interaction can be divided into “input, output, and processing.” 

The medium which achieves interactions is also various, including physical computing, visual communication and fabrication, even some toys and simple circuits. Interaction also can be divided into good or bad, effective or ineffective. I think good interactions should have social meanings and advance user’s experience.

Reference:

• The Art of Interactive Design, Crawford (pages 1-5)
• Physical Computing – Introduction, O’Sullivan and Igoe

Project

I appreciate the robotic arm and I think it helps to achieve effective interaction. It is useful in people’s daily life. It helps people to do many things, like combing, typing word, taking an umbrella, blowing a bubble. With robotic arms, people can use their hands to do something else. It is used for entertainment to make the user happy, especially for children, such kind of interaction reflect through people’s emotional change. It was also very beneficial for the disability. The robotic arms can “read” people’s mind and do the instructions. This indirect and potential interaction makes life more convenient. Robotics arm combines people, environment and some other different organisms. You can obviously feel the interaction power through the video when it does a series of things.

I don’t like this self-defendant jacket. I think this jacket is a failure of interaction. It is strange to wear so many cameras on the jacket. The goal of this cloth is to give a signal to someone who might attack you and record all the images that happened at that time. But it still cannot promise your personal safety. This interaction design is very complicated and inconvenient. And it is also not very sustainable because it might give a message to society “the environment is dangerous”. In other words, this jacket doesn’t enrich the user’s experience but increase their psychological burden.

Research Project:

Research Project prototype:

materials: wasted box, colorful blocks, paper, chopsticks, paper, bottle cap. 

The inspiration for our group work is from a daily life observation. When many students are playing the game home or doing the task in the library, they might feel very thirsty and they need to stop for water. Usually, they need to waste some time in walking to the water machine. This problem inspires me to come up with this idea to create a robot in 2119 which helps people to hold a cup and fill up the cup with water.

Similarly, we hope what we design should be a common product in 2119, which means everyone can access this product instead of only a few people can use it in daily life. A better interaction is not very complicated and better interaction design should not build up a very high barrier for the users.

Therefore, we don’t design a very omnipotent robot who can help people do everything. We design a cup robot which is easier to use and receive the instructions from users.

Another important thing I think is that a good interaction design should not make people lazier. If we have such a powerful robot that can do everything, then people will face a big mass and they won’t do anything at all. The “super cup” robot is specialized in filling water. And it saves time and can make people more focused on temporary things.

Some people are very busy and they might forget to drink water. It is not healthy. We hope this cup can monitor your personal need and provide water for you. It helps people balance their health and work.

When the cup is doing those things, they indeed are doing the interaction with the other factors and environments. When we make the sound instructions, it receives the sound information and it analyses and it makes actions, then fill the water for you. The interactions are realized, and the interaction process is just like a sustainable loop. This inner side will contain the medium and apply advanced technology, which is the approach to achieve interaction. The different parts of the inner robot and the cooperation of the robot’s different parts is also a kind of interaction. 

Such kind of interaction makes our life better and easier. You don’t have to operate it because it can automatically record a personalized healthy index. That’s why we call it a super cup. Healthy, convenient and sustainable are the characteristics of our super cup and are also what we think organic interaction should achieve.  

Though Lgoe thinks “Robotics, with its focus on autonomous mechanical systems, foregrounds the machine’s output, where I think physical computing should ideally foreground the person’s input (though not all of these themes do).”, I think we emphasize both the input of human and the robot for people’s health data checked by the robot indeed is input and the automatic action of the robot is indeed another kind of input. 

Reference:

Physical Computing’s Greatest Hits (and misses) by Tom Igoe

Poster: