Our device is a box with some kind of product for sale on top of it, as well as shining LED lights below it. When a person passes by it, a recording will start to play prompting the person to walk closer, and as they walk closer, the LED lights shine brighter.
When my partner and I were brainstorming about ideas, the use of some kind of sensor was always present in all of our ideas. Sensors are one of the cornerstones of human and machine interaction, as sensors translate human input into machine understanding. In one recitation, we worked on different kinds of sensors, including proximity sensors, and how human movement can trigger devices to do different things. From my previous research with the group project, we focused solely on how the human can interact with the machine, and how the machine can do anything that the human wants. For this project, however, we reversed the roles and made it so that the machine, in a way, was interacting with the human, and vice versa. The significance of this view on interaction does not have to do with seamless integration. The goal for us was not to create a machine that can act as an extension of human capability, but rather to create something that can be as familiar as another human— a machine that interacts with you.
For the conception of the idea, we thought of sensors and sound. One of the most human aspects of ourselves is our voice, and we wanted to integrate that into our project. We decided to create a new way of advertising products in malls. Instead of having signs and posters advertising products, we would create a device that calls out to customers, and talks to them about the product. In order to do this, we used a proximity sensor to detect when a human walks by the device, as well as an MP3 player to play premade voice recordings that cater towards the product. The whole idea of the device is to attract customers to walk towards the product. So in order to do so, we also added and LED light strip that got brighter as the customer would walk closer to the device. As for the aesthetics, our original design idea was to create a large rectangular box with a stand above it in order to showcase a product, as well as LED lights below it. Unfortunately, with limited resources and time, the final prototype was a much smaller wooden box without a stand above it. The wooden box was not the best way to present the project, as it was not aesthetically pleasing and incomplete without the stand on top, however, the device still functioned the way it was supposed to.
In user testing, our product was not complete, so I will be talking about the feedback from the final showcase. The first thing about our design was the lack of it. The product is meant to attract customers, and in order to do so, an aesthetically pleasing design was needed. For the next iteration, we could enlarge the box, and make it out of acrylic instead of wood. On top of that, we could work on the product holder on the top of the box to make it look like we’re really trying to sell the product. As for the design of the one complaint was the direction of the sensor. Our idea was to place the sensor right in front of the box, so that it can detect someone walking right in front of it. Only then will the LED lights react and the MP3 start playing the prerecorded voice callouts. The downside of this is that once the MP3 recording starts playing, the person walking by might by too far away to hear it, as the box would also be behind them. One way to fix this would be to have two sensors angled slightly at opposite sides from the front of the box, so that the device would detect the person walking by and play the recording while the person is still in the device’s vicinity, increasing the chance that the person would stop and look at the product.
Again, the goal of this device was to reinvent the way people advertise products by creating a two way interaction between human and machine. Even with its design flaws, a person who would walk by the device would turn around once the MP3 recording calls them out, and then walk towards the product and listen to the recordings, as if they were listening to a salesman. Although interaction is not as explicit, the way the human interacts with our device would surely fall under the definition of interaction as it draws in human attention through detecting the human, and then the human is drawn into the device due to the recordings and LED lights. If given more time, we would implement the angled proximity sensors, as well as improving on the outwards design. Through creating this device, I learned about the importance of really know every single lin of code’s importance, as well as the importance of user feedback in order to improve the device, and cater it more towards its goal. In my opinion, the world is moving more towards two way interaction between man and machine, and this simple device can show how this two way interaction can work as an effective tool for marketing and selling products.