After the Break

Reading and contemplating the feedbacks we received after the presentation before the break gave us some insights and touchpoints that we should really focus now that the deadline is round the corner. Currently, our project, Senspace is suffering from trying to please and jamming everything into a single pot. I think at least we can focus on three important things:

• Visuals
• Tactility
• Biophilic Design

The way that we will bring these three elements together is by bringing users to a calm state through "ritualistic" ; "stepwise" ; "algorithmic" instructions. We are still jotting down the details but one way were thinking about this is as follows:

Before the users enter the space, we ask them to take off their shoes. Upon entering, they will walk on stone tiles, then they arrive in a patch of grass. Atop the grass, there are cushions: bean bags, pillows, where one can sit. Through relaxed state, we encourage users to look up, contemplate, and ponder over the projected space sky in the ceiling.

What we tried:

This week we are focusing purely on visuals. But what kind of visuals? After a bit of brainstorming together with Yaakulya in C3-155 for quite some time, we thought it was a great idea to have some interactivity in the sense of drawing in the ground. The idea is that relaxation comes from thinking of nothing, and so we split the task into two parts: a) Yaakulya focuses on creating a computer vision program that detects the user’s hand motion (check it out here) and b) I focus on searching for elements that support the atmosphere:

I think we were just curious to see and experiment with how water could be fit into this project since after visiting TeamLab before fall break, playing with water left us a lasting impression. Anyhow, I went ahead and browsed items from the prop shop to see which would help us create the space.

We met again after during the weekends to finally assemble the project. Spoiler alert: it failed miserably. The program we had was not working very well under dim light, and most importantly, there’s still a very big confusing gap between what we want vs. what it does vs how it makes us calm. In regards to space, I played around with the layout for some time before finally giving up. It honestly felt like this prototype was a major fail, simply because we couldn’t come up with anything convicing enough that would make people calm.

What we learned:

But honestly, at least we know something that does not work. There are few things that we can learn from this prototype:

• More is less — We were focused so much on incorporating technology into our project and making it visible to the point that I think it overwhelms us. As we are aiming to make people calmer, shouldn’t we instead make it more invisible? This aligns well with calm technologies.
• Good planning, step at at time — Part of the problem for this week’s prototype that I noticed as well was that we were immediately jumping on the board and started doing things without proper planning. For our next prototype, what we can do is instead ultra focus on a single objective that we wanna try out and fully map out the smaller tasks we are going to do.
• New features means more rules — When thinking about our project, we are just guessing in the dark like: “oh this seems fun,” or “this might make people calm!” But instead of introducing new “features,” what I think we can is instead like planting the idea that: hey, this experience you are going to do WILL make you calm.

Steps moving forward

For next week, we are going to re-iterate this entire prototype but with better floor plan, visuals, and I personally focus on ambience. There are some aspects like lights, and scents that I wanna use for next week prototype.