Exhibition week

We had alots of fun in the exhibition class.

Our group project---Power Dice


our group members, Juan,Jono,Yuan and Andy (guess which one is me?)

2009 5-11~~~5-25

We built 3 dices by using different materials. We had lots of fun in the workshop. We bought a cute dice on EBay, (actually it’s a CD box). After some tests we decided to use the CD dice. It looks really coooooolllllll.
After the Tuesday class, we went to China town had lunch together. We ordered some Chinese food. Juan said he like the first dish. And he had like 5 bottles QingDao beer. OMG~~~~~~~

2009-5-4 3 DICEs

We went to westend and bought some materials for building our dice.
Hope we can finish all of the different materials dices in week 10. we still got lots of works need to do.

2009-4-25 presentation week

In this week we got some feedback from Steven and Marie about our project.
We discussed what we need to finish before this weekend. First we need to build a physical mock-up for this week’s presentation. Juan will do that. Secondly, we need to prepare two scenarios based on feedback from interviews. The hard part in our project is how to make wireless and Bluetooth works. Hope everything going well.

2009-4-18 interview

We finished the interviews during the break. We got many useful feedbacks. Marie helped us a lot. Thanks Marie!

Here are the interview questions and feedback:


Questionnaire
1. Are you aware of your power consumption?
2. Are you aware what standby mode is?
3. If so, do you leave your devices on standby or do you turn them off?
4. How many power points do you have in your living (entertainment) room?
5. Which electrical appliances do you use the most?
6. What are you entertainment activities? (Yourself and with kids)
7. Are there any electrical appliances that you use at the same time?
8. How would you prioritize the usage of the electrical appliances?
9. Do you argue with other family members who want to use the same electrical appliance at the same time? If so, which device?
10. How would the power dice be useful for you? Why? Would this change your original operation/routine?
11. Do you think the Power Dice would improve communication or interaction among the family?
12. Would you use the Power Dice as for chance or control?
13. Would you like to use a dice like this at home? In what areas of your home?
14. Can you give us some suggestions to improve our product?

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Feedback:

2009-4-6

We will do 3 families interviews during the coming break. We came out 14 interviews’ questions, and our lovely tutor Marie helped us to fix some grammar problems. Thanks Marie. So far we have done the physical mock-up dice, we got some really useful feedbacks from Steven, Dekker, Marie and our classmates. For the interview, at first we were thinking to do at least 5 families’ interviews, after some group meeting we decided cut it down to 2-3 families, and Marie will help us to arrange these interviews. Marie, thanks again!
Enjoy your break!

Presentation: Interactive Wall

1. Introduction/Short Review:

Thinking about you just purchased an apartment, you bother with what kind of decorated pictures you should pick for decorating your wall. You want to buy a wii sport, but you have a very tight budget. When you complain your life with your friend, he takes you to a technology product exhibition. You find something you might need in there. Now imagine you living in a house with an amazing wall which is combined with animation, and wii sport. When you walking around in your room, you feel like you are walking in a forest. You can play basketball with this wall in a rainy weather. You can show your music intelligence without a piano in front of your friends. Will you buy it? Now I will show you how a wall can be interactive with your body as a controller.



2.The Technology:

There is no enough information about how did they create this interactive wall. Therefore I googled “interactive wall” and found out some similar products. Hope these information can help us to understand the process.

Briefly, the wall is usually vertical screen where a user can approach and interact with her hand or body. it uses computer vision technology to make interaction between people and the wall. The picture moves with your every movement. The surface of the wall is kind of like a touch screen. Animation and sport games are already installed in it. You just need to choose which animation you want to display on the wall, which game you’d like to play. The designing system or principle of interactive wall is similar with wii sport system but a huge wall instead of TV.













3.Usefulness and Relevant:
A sustainable product is not only about save resources, reduce pollution, make sure product lasts longer, but also considers about people’s need, the daily life.
For example, parents sometimes find themselves worrying about their children's safety in playing sports outdoors, fearing that they may be injured. They also do not like children playing football or basketball in the home, because such activities tend to result in broken household items. But the interactive wall creates a decorative, safe, and imaginative playing environment for children.

4.Reflection:

I think the interactive wall is a creative product, even though it could not replace the normal wall now. During my research process, I found many amazing videos about sustainable products. Successful design makes people’s life more interesting and easier.
In the future, these kinds of energy-save products will become the mainstream, and now are only the beginning stage of such inventions, but also required a more in-depth research. Sustainable product will become universal, which plays a main role in people’s life.

5.Reference list

1.The video “Interactive Wall” is available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e3dWa3tP1Q
Other useful links
2.http://www.gesturetek.com/gesturefx/productsolutions_wallfx.php
3.http://www.boldtoad.com/blog/?p=130
4.http://www.odcsss.ie/content/visualising-environmental-sensor-data-interactive-wall

WEEK 2

In week two, we were also focusing on Sustainability. In the contact class, we discussed three questions about sustainability.

1.Why is it important? Purposes of a product should be sustainable because of we need to reduce pollution, we need to save resources, we should care about our life and social environment.

2.Who does it affect? Sustainable products affect everyone’s life. We are using resource at a continually increasing rate, creating the need to react restore, preserve what little resources we have remaining. We are now reaching a peak of oil consumption and production. Human consume 80.5 million of barrels each day. Demand is increasing 2-3%. When will we reduce our oil dependency? Rain-forests once covered 14% of the planet; there are only 6% of the original forests remaining.


3. How can we design things to be more sustainable? Designer should keep “sustainable” in their mind when they make a new product. Such as they should consider about how to make product lasts longer? People/user should have a good behavior on their daily life. For example: Change all of the light bulbs in your home to compact fluorescent which use a fraction of the energy compared to typical light bulbs. If every household in US converted 5 light bulbs to CFs, the energy saved would almost equal the emissions from nearly 10 million cars.
Separate any recyclable materials out of your trash. Every American consumes nearly 136 pounds of resources each week with 2000 pounds used to support that consumption.
The average individual produces about 4 pounds of trash each day. Nearly 1600 pounds each year.
Replace your shower heads with low floe shower heads; doing so can reduce your water consumption by 50%.

During the workshop class, we had some short presentations about what could we design to improve sustainability. Every group gave a great examples, and Stephen drew a diagram on the whiteboard that is contained all of the good ideas about sustainable products.

Here is the diagram:

WEEK 1

(This journal should be posted on week one.)

Forgive my bad memory, I just remember couple of things we have done in week one.

1. We created our personal blog in week one.
2. We need to post a journal for each week.
3. Looking forward to what we going to create in this semester.

We had Will Odom as our guest lecturer; he talked about what is sustainability, and he showed us some good videos about sustainable products.

“Physical computing”, before I attended the first class, I thought is an abstract subject. But after the first lecture and contact, and I look through some examples and videos on web, I found most of them are very interesting.