First finished module – PlanT

So today we finally finished the Mobile application Design work, we gave a 3 minutes presentation for our work, basically we got not bad feedback from Shane. But for me, I am still have a little regrets for the least work.

I made the video to present our demo’s core function, link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmlwEgcVy-E&t=4s

This is my first time take part in the whole procedure of design a App, i was inspired by the apps Focus and AliPay. They both come up with the concept which improve the  environment through our different efforts. So i was thinking why don’t we made a productive app based on this ideas, we not only improve ourselves, but also improve our environment. I think people are happy to see they really make some contribution on real world.

Thanks for the Shane, he definitely is a businessman. Besides the knowledge of building an app, he also asked us to think about business model and USP. I have to say if i want to have a job in some design companies, i definitely need to know these concepts. We can’t be a student all the time, we will work in somewhere in one day. I learnt a lot from him.

The Marvel link:

For first user: https://marvelapp.com/612gc76

For existing user: https://marvelapp.com/15ee19jg

 

Pocket Museum

As a part of work with Mikael, our imedia class will hold an Pocket Museum exhibition in the Limerick Hunt Museum on 1st May.

The objects in this pocket museum are inspired by the Hunt Museum Sliver Romanderm Antrm Cross, and two lockets. The lockets are pendant that opens to reveal a space used for storing a photograph or other small item. So the story in my tiny museum is that a pair of lovers both keep special belonging from their lover, and express the sense of missing.  This is a boring story, i know. :p

So I used the Maya to build the model, print them out by using the 3d printer, and cut the box by using laser cutting.

Useful link for making a box: http://www.makercase.com/

Look forward to the exhibition!

Role playing

 

Aims

A method allow the designers and potential users to explore the scenarios with the target usability in a physical experience way.

Outline

A role playing method usually used as a way of doing prototyping, through assigning different characters to the stakeholders (users), which can helps you get an idea, feedback and experience.

How to do with role playing? (Design kit, 20118)

• Make a decision with the ideas or project you want to role playing, and recruit the users.
• Assign the different roles to the users, tell them a scene before you start with activity
• Make the actors interact with your design, ask the actors to talk about their feeling when they doing the “acting”

 

Examples

The role-playing method was firstly used for interactive design for about 10 years. Burns et al(1994) as the leader of using role-playing method into developing and communicating new design concept joined the most famous design company IEDO.

GO Project

The objective of the GO Project is to implement a wireless network in the campus area of the Helsinki University of Technology to investigate the Service Architecture for the Nomadic Internet User of the Future. They were going to design a mobile device and services, in order to generate the product concept they chose the role-playing game as method to help them to generate with the new product. They designed a 5 participants involved game, the designers took part in it but just push the game woking. The three users are actual players. The design team created five places with the graphical symbols, the player could visit with their toy characters. They also set some incident card to explain some surprises to the game. (Giulio et al, 2000)

The design team got the positive and successful feedback through the games. These places helped the players to realize which artifacts should be the part of the environment. The incident cards provide the chance to let users be aware of each others. Overall, the design team reached their target and developed the concept based on the game results.

 

Comments

Role playing definitely give designers a quick and convenient way to test their target goal, or come up with new concept. Generally speaking, role playing doesn’t need too much time to prepare. Props can be any kind of objects. It barely cost money on it, the main resource in this method is people’s performance. Everyone could take part in the activities. And people is usually fond of getting involve with role-playing games. The workshop always fun of entertainment, so it’s easy to recurit the people to participate with the activities.

While role- play is difficult to reproduce. That’s means that you probably get the same results from different people when you wan to test the same content.

Application

Role-playing could be used as any step of designing processes, in most of the situation, it would be used for testing and conducting new concept. You probably need to create the personas, scenarios or storyboard to give a rule(scene) to user to perform.

Time and cost

The time cost depends on the content you want to do, generally it will takes at least 30 mins. It could longer if you have difference scene need to be performed.

References

1. Interactive Design Foundation(2018)Prototyping: Learn Eight Common Methods and Best Practices [online}, available: https://www.interactiondesign.org/literature/article/prototyping-learn-eight-common-methods-and-best-practices [accessed 3 Mar 2018]
2. Design Kit (2018) Role play [online], available :http://www.designkit.org/methods/36 [accessed 18 Mar 2018]
3. Katja, Roland (2012) The role of  role-playing :intangible systems representations for  business innovations [online], available: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234066094_THE_ROLE_OF_ROLE-PLAY_INTANGIBLE_SYSTEMSREPRESENTATIONS_FOR_BUSINESS_INNOVATIONS[accessed Aug 2012]
4. Lily Diaz, Markku Reunanen and Anna Salm (2009) Role playing and scenarios design development [online]. available: https://www.designsociety.org/publication/28727/Role+playing+and+collaborative+scenario+development [accessed 24-27 Aug, 2009]
5. Stella Boss(2006) Rationales for role playing in design[online], available: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.536.9368&rep=rep1&type=pdf
6. Giulio Iacucci, Kari Kuutti and Mervi Ranta(2000) On the Move with a Magic Thing: Role Playing in Concept Design of Mobile Services and Devices [online], available: https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/jacucci/magic-DIS2010.pdf

Developing a collaborative design tool to explore topic about interactive technology and sleep disorder

Introduction

When we talk about the sleep disorder, the word which firstly come to our mind is insomnia. Insomnia is the most pervasive sleep disorder, which characterized by having problem with maintenance of high quality sleep even the people desire to do. According to the physical guideline, the common causes of insomnia are emotional disturbance and sleep-related dysfunctional thought. The National Institutes of the Health shows that nearly 30 percent of the general population have the experience with the sleep disruption. Based on the survey from National Sleep Foundation, more than 50 percent of participants reflected they have had at least one symptom of insomnia per week in the past year. Even 33 percent said they have had one of these symptoms every night in the past years. (National Sleep Foundation, 2018) When we eager to find the treatment to deal with people’s sleep, the insomniacs probably need both the physical and psychological intervention. But not all of insomniacs have these emotional disturbances, the truth is most of insomniacs do not have a proper lifestyle before the bed. As the technology has developed, the use of the electronic devices in the bedroom increased dramatically. The use of the technology before the bedtime show the negative influence with the sleep. In 2011 Sleep in America Poll, the National Sleep Foundation focuses more on technology use and relationships to sleep. The data result is shocked. About 90 percent of American said they use technology before the bedtime. The technology involves the cell phones, computers/laptops, and video games. And television was the most common use in general. (Grandner, Gallagher & Gooneratne, 2013). Although many of researchers has conducted the research with the relationship between the sleep and technology, the experience told that our life is still closely associated with the technology. For the purpose of this essay, I will be exploring the relationship between the interactive technology and sleep disorder as well as how the interactive technology affects our sleep. In this assignment, I plan to use the collaborative design tools to develop and explore that what the relationship between the interactive technology and sleep disorder, how to use the interactive technology to improve the sleep, instead of destroying it.

Developing a collaborative design tool

The collaborative design tool as an approach of participatory design, which is focused on the processes and procedure of design. The design processing will be involving all the stakeholders to ensure the all satisfied with their needs. From this module we have known about three major collaborative design tools: Design Games, Design probes and Critical Design. I have decided to use the design probes as my tool to develop this project. The first Probes project was developed by Bill Gaver to explored how to engage the older participants into their life of their communities. (Gaver et al, 1999) Probes are design user research toolkits that invite or provokes user to express their feeling, record their behavior, visualized their experiences, activities and context. (Mattelmaki, 2005) As my topic is interactive technology and sleep disorder, I think the Design Probes would be the best tool to develop this project. Most of things I need to know at this stage is exploring how does the sleep disorder people behave in the front of the technology, and how to use the technology to promote people’s sleep.

The 4 tasks in my probe as the pictures shown below:

Expectation:

As I develop these design probes, I hope to see as much as possible details with relationship between the interactive technology and sleep disorder. Compared with the other collborative design tools, I think the design probes is the most reasonable and suitable design explore method to develop such kind of topic. On the Gabrila’s class, we disscussed that everyone is both the maker and designer, the difference between the real designer and others is designer need to make the every wish come true in a more technological way. Every design is orginal from the users. Once truly get well know about the users by using the proper method, we can get a result to design. The design probes built an indirect method to communicate and exploring with our users. My probes hope to create an effective solution to improve the people sleep disorder. With the repaidly development of the society, many factors are threated with people health condition, especially for the people who have high stress in their life. The appearance of technology is helping the human to improve their life standard and create a friendly life environment, rather than let the technology create negative impact on human’s life. It is my hope that this project could make progress on built a postive lifestyle for people, and change the behaviour into a health aspects.

Analogue Prototype

It is more harder than i thought to build an App, you need to make sure you familiar with the platform which you chose. I am user of App for almost 5 years, when you try to build an app by yourself, you still no idea what does these interfaces look like.

There are lots of productive apps in the marketing now. So we went through some good apps and made ours. Our USP make our app differ from others, but at this stage, we apparently can’t focus more on that. Building the basic concepts already made us crazy.

We already built the very simple digital prototype on marvel, and did the test with Sushimita. We got positive feedback, that is a good beginning. So next stage, we need focus more on the “tree” part, and improve the UI thing on the Marvel.

A good tool to do the mind-mapping: https://coggle.it/

User test video: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pR3E72Bl-m94aLETYn1vQAWEZDaqyit2

 

From User Experience Design to Behaviour Management (group seminar)

Yesterday Emma, Sean and I did the group seminar with our colleagues. Our topic is From User Experience Design to Behaviour Management. Our seminar mainly divided into two parts: presentation and workshop. The workshop is extremely successful, we were happy to see everyone would like to take part in the design activity and debate.

Through this seminar, I systemically learnt about more concepts about UX (user experience), as a UX designer, we need to learn more about user behaviours. The Fogg Behavior Model shows that three elements must converge at the same momentfor a behavior to occur:Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing. So the UX designers always should keep this in mind, which helps you to created the good design. 

During our workshop, we asked our colleagues to redesign the cigarette, no alcohol drinks to adults and study pills. They need redesign the packages so that make more people to buy them.

Some of our colleagues’ work:

For the second activity in the workshop, we held a debate. Based on the news that Facebook uses an algorithm to filter content. The experiment aimed to determine whether the company could alter the emotional state of its user. Designed to assess whether more positive or negative comments in a Facebook newsfeed would impact how the user updated their own page. We seperate our colleague into two groups: one  group will argue in favor of Facebook, using the reasoning conveyed in their statement to condone the experiment that was carried. Looking at the positives of them doing so and expanding on this. The other group will uphold the popular public opinion that this experiment was “unethical”. Focusing on the impact that it could have possibly had on certain individuals, especially those who were purposefully presented with media aiming to provoke negative emotions.

 

Circular Design

The Circular Design creates a cycle that encourage designers to think about sustainable through a whole design processing. How to create a sustainable environment always is a popular topic in our life. With the time goes by,  the resources in this planet will be run out in future. Resources could lead the war, even more worse situation. There are many companies, like ikea, Apple, H&M, they all have recycle service now. They begin to make contribution to our environment, the term of circular design doesn’t such new word in the design. The IDEO, as the leader of the design, comes up with the butterfly diagram, which demonstrate the “circular flow”.

In the workshop, we played a design game, which is also conducted by the IDEO company, called circular ventures.

We were asked to think about a company for each person, you need to think about what kind of company it is, what is your service etc. Based on these, we need to figure out what kind of resource do we have for the group, and brainstorm the project which combine all the resources you would have.

The pitch

After several round discussions, we finally settled down our idea for the Mobile Application Design. Maya and Luoning both put up with some interesting ideas, it is hard to chose from Wetidy and Effort Garden. But we voted, so we picked the Effort Garden as our project.

This app will be called PlanT. It is a app about plan, also the plant.

Problem Statement: People tend to set goals to improve their lives, usually at the beginning of the year, but very few manage to accomplish them. It is easy to make a resolution but majority of people fail to stick to it.

Solution: The aim of this app is to encourage people to stick to their resolution by giving them constant feedback on every accomplished task. Users can set their resolutions (goals) as a projects consists of smaller tasks for each accomplished they are going to
be awarded with some plant grow supplement. If the user manage to accomplish her/his
goal, a real tree is going to be planted!

This self management app allow users to plant a tree in a real world as a result of their own accomplished goal. Users can set their resolutions (goals) as projects consists of smaller tasks for each accomplished they are going to be awarded with positive feedback. This positive feedback is going to be shown through animation. Each project will be given a seed/sapling at the start. Every each task accomplished within a project is going to be awarded in form of some plant grow supplement (sunshine, water, fertilizer). If the user manages to finish hers or his project, a real tree is going to be planted!
App provides users with predefined library from which user can select between
most common resolutions/projects and then customize them as they prefer. This app will allow users to record every each step towards their goal. It is designed as a self promotion diary allowing users to review their achievements.

Principle of IMD (wearable)

Well, I begin to write the blog to record what happened with my master degree course in UL. I hope I am not miss too much.

So on the principle of the IMD we learnt about the wearable technology, on the workshop class, we were asked to design a wearable product for the specific person. Based on the personas my imedia colleague come up with, Maja and I chose the insomniac as our user.

As our user is a businesswoman, we decided to design a comfort pillow for her. After the workshop, we were kinda not sure if the pillow is wearable devices. while, the product was welcome by our colleagues anyway. SO this pillow is shaped as an banana. The pillow can play the music, which gives users chance to import their favourite music to help them fall into sleep. It also provides a comfort temperature when you hold them. In the meantime, it could mobilize the scent to help the people feel relaxed.

Perspectivity Challenge Game – sustainable interaction design

In today’s workshop. we were asked to play a board game which conducted by the Perspectivity Company. It is a decision making game, the participants should considerate you want econmic growth, or sustainable environment development.

Well, as a player, we were informed that the winner will be the people who earn the most of point after 10 rounds. At least two rounds, I tried to earn the money and reach to the multiple point ASAP. Once we finished the first three rounds, I began to realize there are too many polluted factories on the board. I don’t know what gonna happen later. Obviously, pollution brings the disaster. The game designers conduct rules to fix problem up, so that we lost built factories.

As we were divided into the different group, we became the competitors, and all faced conflicts during the game. Most of time we used dice to decide us destiny. But we noticed if you want to win-win your business, you probably need to cooperate with your competitors!

Anyway, that’s a quite interesting game, which leads player think a lot. This kind of  game is exactly what we learnt from Cristiano class. Now I should think my design game.