Oct 02

readings instructions sets

The readings gave me a very open-ended understanding of this project, but I kind of like that aspect of it. Out of the specific things I found inspiring, I thought that I was interesting how cultural probes applied methods of data collection one would find in the scientific process. However, this analytical technique is applied to expressive data, which in it’s nature is very subjective and hard to quantify with language and mathematics. The result became something quite interesting, a study of the intangible aspects of subcultures that conveyed a perspective through overwhelming detail.

In a narrative sense, I think this project uncovered some very useful tools for building convincing story worlds and play spaces. All of this data, whether fact or fiction, makes a narrative space seem larger and more complex than it really is. This could be used to make constructed systems feel more realistic, or seamless in everyday life.

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, presents a very supported theory for the design of public spaces in cities that follows the logic of the people and how they use them. It made me notice the differences in local parks, the reasons people are there, how limited their interactions with the space are, and what the space actually accomplishes.

I think that these are all very important questions in UX design, and it was interesting to see these considerations applied to tangible locations. It also made me consider how we can design meaningful “communication” between users and space. In this context I still can’t agree on what would or should be meaningful, but it made me think.

Oct 02

Instruction Sets For Strangers / Reading response

Cultural Probes
  I like the method that they used for observing elderly people’s environment. They considered a lot of part of elderly people in various aspects and tried to be objective such as cultural differences, age gap, etc. Especially, I like the way they get information from elderly people. They didn’t ask a specific question but try to reduce giving some what direction that can affect to the answers from them. I also like the part that they used very analog way – postcard – which I think it is good to understand their feelings and thinkings more deeply than just giving a questioning paper form. In addition, I like the way they apply to new technologies. In specific, they tried to make the new technologies after understanding elderly people whereas people try to build just fancy and surprising new technologies nowadays. Some people are just focusing on producing amazing technology and showing up their ability of making it, but I think people need to understand more about users before just producing it, otherwise it is possible that our lives will be taken by technology.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
 I agree with the idea that he described in the reading, ‘we see what we expect to see.’ I think the expectation make us to observe in limit, but it is hard to break our frame and open all the senses to think in various aspects.
I like the way of observing people’s movement in spaces and I am very interesting the author’s thought which is about foot movement are silent language. People usually make movements in some purposes and these can be a good resource to understand how people interact to environment. In other point, I want to compare what people really do unconsciously to what people say to questionnaires that can extremely different from each other. It would be very interesting to compare how people interact to the environment in reality to how people think they are interacting with the environment.

Oct 02

Feedback Loop- iSlouch

For my Feedback Loop project I have created a prototype for iSlouch. The basic idea is that when using the computer it is easy to lose good posture gradually. When the user begins to slouch iSlouch will notify the user by showing a graphic of what the user’s spine looks like. This graphic will take form as a transparent sheet across the screen that the user is working on. This version of the prototype uses a face detection library with the computer’s camera and whenever the detected face dips along the y-axis, the curved spine graphic is triggered.

Here is a demonstration.

This prototype was tested on 2 people so far with the following feedback:

-They both liked the fact that nothing had to attach to their bodies.

-They liked the simple style of the graphic

-They would like to see more accuracy in a further iteration

Oct 02

Valuing the Human

I often forget that the entire world is designed. It may be a lack of reflection or observation, but I have to be reminded that public spaces don’t just sprout up completely formed. For that reason, I really enjoyed The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. I was intrigued by their research process and seemingly bottomless wells of patience. I love the idea that humans follow some patterns inherently and organically, so much so that you can predict their seating choices and foot patterns. As we discussed back in the Prototyping section, without focusing on the user and how he intends to utilize a product or, in this case, space, you can’t really successfully design anything. The author mentioned how their results may seem completely obvious and common sensical to us, but often their hypotheses ran wholly counter to their discoveries. As designers, we cannot rely on what we personally feel is best or what we assume to be objective truth without proper user-centric research.

That approach is why the Cultural Probes project worked so well. I love all the tactile ways they chose to communicate their ideas and further their research process. I think most people and companies wishing to obtain market research data would shy away from their methods because of its air of homemade-ness and lack of professionalism. But that is exactly why it worked. In this era, we can spot a marketing survey a mile away. We see the sleek sheen of a company seeking to understand how we think and what we desire and we run off in the opposite direction. But this, this reconnecting to space and time and physical things we can reach out and touch, without being unnecessarily and hipsterly nostalgic, is quite special. It is successful because it focuses on the human and how we interact with things and places and ideas.

When we value the user, the human in all of this, enough to step away from our deceptively shiny professionalism, enough to effectively stalk young raffish crowds in public spaces for three years, we come out the other side with real results, equipped with the data points to effect positive change.

UPDATE: The other point that I noticed is the opposite methods they utilized in gathering user data. In the Urban Spaces piece, they don’t trust the user to tell them the truth, perhaps rightfully so, as the user lies, or convinces himself of the lies, about what he wants from the space. In a survey, people may say they don’t want to hang out in crowds, but if you actually watch people, you see the truth that they do wish to socialize and exist in crowds. Whereas the designers in Cultural Probes trust the user so much that they send them off into the world with the packet and relinquish all control over it. They trust the user to come back with all sorts of information and data as the user sees fit, not as the designers request. These are actually two polarizing, extreme positions to user research.

Oct 02

Instruction Sets for Strangers reading response

1. “Cultural Probes”- Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne, &  Elena Pacenti
Actually, The aesthetic of the packages is a really good way to reduce the distance between designer and the groups. Also it can find some actual issues.

As a design, user-centered design is the most important. For example, User-centered design is a huge component of what Apple does and why it and other companies have been successful in the consumer market.

In this reading, there has one sentence that attracts me. “Elders represent a lifetime of experiences and knowledge, often deeply embedded in their local communities, this could be an invaluable resource to the younger members of their community.”We may learn a lot of things from elders, also elder influenced society to a great extent.

2. “The Social Life of Urban Spaces” -William Whyte
In this day and age, our social space is more and more small. A lot of people are addicted to the uncluttered roads, but they fail to notice good squares. Especially in some big city, there has no place to enjoy the sun of the afternoon.

About city planning, I think of that taking human being as essential and being harmonious with nature are the most important. Only a friendly city planning can embody the true social functions.

Oct 02

Feedback Loop and Redo Mashup

I create this two related design from a same concept ( one is for my feedback loop, another one is for my mashup) that I mentioned last time about a cup can tell people how much calories from their drink and the distance they need walk to burn those calories.

The first design is called walking cup. it is a digital cup has vertical mark outside to show a distance and number of calories of the beverage one the of  front side cup. Also the distance can be shown as  a distance between two landmark places in your city. For example, if you drink a whole cup of soda, you need walk 2.4 miles, from Times Square to Washington Square. I wanna put there marks on the cup, and they provide  three most common drink’s information. which are  soda, coffee and juice.

Here is short video about my first design:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svdUSjdZgUw

The second design is app work with my walking cup. The cup can record the calories data can sent to your phone. At the same time you need put your weight information in this app to make the analyzing  more accurate. The app for walking cup can analyze this data with your weight  and tell you how much calories you need walk to burn from your drink and link to your google map or apple map to tell you a specific destination you need walk from your current location.If you do not need google map make you a route , this app will just track your movement during your day to tell you how much you still need to walk.

soda 1 soda 2 soda 3 soda 6

Oct 01

Reading response Of Instruction Sets For Strangers

1) Culture Probes

In the passage of Culture Probes, the author talked about a some experimental urban strategy to evoke some suggestive response from elderly people. The way that project to execute really provided some inspiration to me to observe people’s behavior and helps me a new way to  finding the real essence meaning behind the appearance. For example , like what author mentioned in the passage, sometimes we give some intervention to people in order to create some unexpected ideas.

Also, the effects of the culture probes is also interesting, the half part is what the project creator learns from elderly people while other half is what did those elderly people learned from the project. The culture probes project provided me a way to reconsider the way we are doing a project, it’s not only about the idea and what kind of purpose we want to achieve, culture probes project provided new way to create more possibilities.

2) The social life of modern urban place

The content in the passage describe some interesting phenomenon about people’s behavior in urban public space, for example, as author mentioned in the passage, that people rarely choose to stay in the middle of a large space in plaza, and this observation made author to meditate and provided couples of possible reason of this phenomenon. Maybe because people want to face the sidewalk, and stand by walls in the plaza that make them feel more comfortable and secure.

The observation that author mentioned in the passage remind me of some experience I had in the city, If you step off the curb in New York City and a taxi is coming, you’ve got to worry ,and the coming car might have pushed you back to wait for a while in order to confirm whether it will stop or not.  But if there’s pedestrian traffic light in front of me, I will go across the street without waiting or confirmation.  So do humans become more brave because of the city design and hence become more in danger? And this kind of observation may lead designer to meditate on the question that which kind of urban space design could increase the people’s  sense of secure? I think this could be an inspirational topic because a sense of security is actually  a kind of feeling that residents in big city  that  intensely demanding.

Oct 01

Reading Response: Instruction Sets for Strangers

1. “The Social Life of Urban Spaces” -William Whyte

This article highlights the importance of research when designing public spaces in urban environments. Research of how the public spaces are intended to be used and on the intended users themselves. Whyte mentions, for example, that men and women interact with their environments differently. That women are more discriminating when it comes to their environment- where they sit for example. But that on average there is a higher percentage of women than men in these public areas, and if there is not that something must be wrong with the design. Different affordances of an urban space can lead to uses that were not originally intended, such as Whyte’s example of the street as a play area, and stoops and fire escapes as good viewing posts for guardians. All of these ideas need to be taken into account when designing for public spaces.

2. “Cultural Probes”- Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne, &  Elena Pacenti

This reading follows suit from “The Social Life of Urban Spaces”, talking about the importance of research on the intended user groups. The authors of this article describe a research approach that gives the users a lot of control. The researchers did not simply hand out typical questionnaires for the users, but instead provided them with a set of probes to initiate a thought process of the space design. All materials that were supplied by the researchers were very visual and personal in nature. With this particular group of participants, this style of research worked very well.

 

Oct 01

Instruction Sets for Strangers reading response

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

It’s interesting to read about a perspective of NYC from 1970 and think about what changes (or not) may have occurred since.  This research team focused heavily on young professionals and their habits around their office buildings during lunch breaks.  Their observation that crowded spaces were traced to a series of “choke points” that only comprise a small portion of downtown spaces was surprising at first, but then relatable when I thought about my own experience in NYC.  The locations that I frequent often such as Union Square are always populated, but going down any side street especially at night and many of these spaces are near empty.  The study made notable observations of typical plaza interactions but did not touch upon the least used plazas and how their space can be optimized to encourage more use, which I’d like to hear about.

Cultural Probes

This project is really exciting to me because it reminds me a lot of the Fluxus art movement and mail art that occurred in the 60s that encouraged people to blend different media and topics to make your own art aesthetic.  Utilizing this technique as a research method to learn about differing culture groups is an intelligent way to hear stories through easily recognizable objects such as postcards and disposable cameras.  Communicating through this means is not just a good idea for the elderly, but should be applied to more research groups because the media is fun to use, personable, and allows for wide interpretation of use.  The designers in this project were very open minded with their research direction, yet their curation was still clear and defined for their purpose.

Sep 30

Feedback Loop Idea

My idea for Feedback Loop is from checking your sleeping (health) condition.  Usually, we don’t know our behavior while we are sleeping, so it is hard to change our sleeping behaviors. Specifically, snoring is one of the sleeping behaviors that is not considered as a problem, but it also can be a serious problem if it is too frequently and strongly happen.  It means snoring can impact our health such as causing sleep deprivation, daytime drowsiness, irritability, and also risk of brain damage and of stroke.

I want to make feedback loop about sleeping health condition that one can notice one’s sleeping behavior which is hard to know and difficult to get feedback. I want to make a feedback loop that is about collecting data about sleeping condition and also express data by shaking the bed. It will give the person the feedback whenever the person is snoring, so he might be able to change his behavior by applying some of treatments for snoring.