Three projects I critiqued
The first project we examined is the “Water Lilies Music player”. More specifically, this project mainly consists of several specially designed and handmade water lilies. To interact with this project, the users should put their fingers or a stick into the center of the water lilies, in response there will be music. There are four water lilies overall, three of them will play music of a traditional Chinese instrument called Bianzhong, the remaining one will play random sound made by animals. Different sound will correspondingly have different visual representations in the Processing sketch. During the discussion, all of our group members think the underlying meaning and goal of this project to advocate traditional Chinese culture is great since it combined the aesthetic and historical dimensions together. For the interaction part, we think the interactive design of this project makes sense in its own narration and logic, while still lack of natural motivations. It is to say that the interactive design is not self-motivated to the users since it may not be the natural reactions or behaviors the users will do in the first place when they engage in an interaction with the project. Thus, we suggest that the designer should add more interactive design into the project.
The second project we discussed is the ”Growing Tree”. Basically, this project is designed for preventing procrastination and stimulating productivity. The project consists of a physical box connected to the arduino and a visual image of a tree on the processing. When people put their smartphone in the box and the gravity sensor identifies it, the tree on the screen will start to grow. Once the smartphones are taken out, the tree will stop growing immediately and eventually die. Friends can corporate together in this project by putting their smartphones simultaneously in the box. The more phones are in the box, the faster the tree grows. We think this project is highly meaningful and interactive. Since it not only bounds humans and machines together but also motivates the interaction among human beings. Also this project shows great value in the contemporary world when people are too addicted in the digital world that lead to negative impact on their real lifes and the effectiveness of the society. The major concern of this project is that the way of interaction is so limited, with only the simple behavior of putting your phones into the box. We suggested the designer to add more interesting function and interaction in her project.
The third project we talked about is the “magical maze”. The main part of the project is a maze. The users will use the handmade joystick to control the the direction of the visual line in the maze to fulfill certain routines. The major goal of this game is not getting out of the maze but follow the assigned instructions set up by the designer. Our suggestion for the potential progression of this project is that they could add more features to the visual images of this maze to make it more aesthetically valuable and thus appealing. For instance, we suggest that the designer make the eventual routine look like a painting or image to surprise the players since they don’t know what they are gonna create in the first place.
From these three projects, I acknowledged that no what how different the formats are, they all represent unique purpose and rich meanings that will be motivational to the target audience, thus applying to my definition of interaction. The first project focused on exploring traditional Chinese music, which shows the designers’ respect and attention in the aesthetic and artistic area. The second project focused on trending social issue about the addictions of digital devices, showing designer’s care for the whole society. The third project created an innovative gamified way of art production, which represents both aesthetic and entertaining values.
Feedback on my project
According to my peers, the most interesting and meaningful part of my project is the underlying intention and goal of it. I want to use this project to raise people’s awareness of the interaction between human and plants, thus paying more attention to the livelihood and subjectivity of plants as significant creatures in our planet. They think this is a fairly good point. However, they also think the plan of my project would be too vague and thus difficult to put into practice. For example, they think the function that I want to achieve in the project are too much, thus maybe I can specify what interactions or reactions I want to achieve in this project to better represent the feelings and emotions of the plant. Another critique is from the presentation session, in which my instructor thought I should change the way of interaction in my proposal of project since she thinks the imitation may not be motivational and necessary.
Learning from the feedback of my peers as well as the instructor, I decided to apply one important change on my project. Initially, I was thinking about use the keyboard or mouse as the medium and entrance for the users to interact with the “plants” on the screen and they can also get similar feedback from the physical model. Now I decided to make the physical model of the “Plants” as the interactive entrance. Basically, the users are gonna interact with the physical model with their hands or other tools (flashlights, water, etc.) and then they will get the visual and verbal reactions from the plants on the screen. This interaction matches better with the interactive habits of human beings, thus making them feel more authentic. Another suggestion I am considering is to replace the artificial model of plants with a real plants with sensors attached. I would examine the difficulty and fasibility of this change first to decide which approach I will take later.