Max van Dijck BCT

To gain user feedback on what colours people associate with space I created a curvey with several colour pallettes found on colourlovers.com . This allowed us to get an idea of  complimentary colours we could put on our dress.

Survey can be found here: https://forms.gle/fK3CvK3x6regf9m89

The most popular colour palette was Interstellar by ProjectVisuni which can be found here: https://www.colourlovers.com/palette/3348506/Interstellar

Another form of testing I created was a Processing program where users could pull different space parts such as satellite dishes or solar panels onto a mannequin. This worked well as rather than asking the subject questions they were specifically involved in the design process.

My new group filled me in to what we are planning to produce for the wearables stream, the main ideas being trans formative dresses based on scientific issues.

I told the group about several methods in which we could transform the outfit using electronics and Arduino.

NOTE: Blue wires were used as ground due to lack of Black

Photos

Video

I started off my project by beginning to do research around an idea I was sitting on during the break. It is quite a broad idea but the general idea is bushing towards the “Smart Home” movement

I’m proposing to integrate a house security system with the mains switchboard and front door locks.

I found information on home security, household power usage and RFID vs regular key locks.

Home Security

Through the NZ Police database I found that there were 65,205 cases of unlawful entry with intent/burglary in the past year with the majority of incidents happening in the early afternoon. Ideally my project would make it increasingly difficult thus deterring burglary and break-ins of my target users.

https://www.police.govt.nz/about-us/publications-statistics/data-and-statistics/policedatanz/victimisation-time-and-place

Power Consumption

I found that standby and baseload consumption together can account for 10% of the energy used in an average house – around $200 per house per year (all electric house @ $0.28/kWh).

My project aims to reduce standby power consumption by controlling the mains board when the user leaves the house.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/39067/are-keys-or-rfid-tags-more-secure-access-control-solutions

RFID vs Keys

In this area there was little active research however I believe that the fact that businesses are using tighter security methods involving RFID tags over physical keys to be evidence that RFID is more secure

I also found forum topics on Stackexchange which reinforced this argument

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/39067/are-keys-or-rfid-tags-more-secure-access-control-solutions

 Drafts

App control

I drafted up an app UI and listed the general communications that the app would have with other users and the security system. This should be able to guide the requirements and integrations of the project in a specific way and should make the project intention easier to interpretate.

Lock mechanism

I also prototyped a general locking mechanism using Arduino, RFID and a micro servo. Using arduino worked well because it provided a quick way to get the components working together HOWEVER translating the circuit into a smaller enclosure may prove to be difficult.

Pitch

I began my powerpoint pitch in anticipation and It will continue being a work in progress for a while.

Signal Blog posts

1

https://maxantony1.tumblr.com/post/184721100298/finding-our-purpose

2

https://maxantony1.tumblr.com/post/184731191778/postin-it

3

https://maxantony1.tumblr.com/post/184768781993/finding-an-issue

4

https://maxantony1.tumblr.com/post/184844205588/usertesting

5

https://maxantony1.tumblr.com/post/184905603398/act-2-down

6

https://maxantony1.tumblr.com/post/185029131023/follow-up-playtesting-and-finishing-code

7

https://maxantony1.tumblr.com/post/185169180003/act-3

8

https://maxantony1.tumblr.com/post/185196680393/filming-hard

9

https://maxantony1.tumblr.com/post/185268329353/filming-done

10

https://maxantony1.tumblr.com/post/185357858928/open-studio-eminent

11

On the day of open studio I was sent the edited film clips and frantically started compiling them together, It took about 4 hours straight of re-coding and renaming, In future if doing a digital project I would reinforce naming conventions and declare following a set plan as this process was definitely hell for me.

During open studio we gained valuable feedback from users on the overall message they interpreted, their attachment to the protagonist and difficulty they felt in the decisions through a digital google form. Using this form worked well as it did not have to be guided through by a group member and multiple people could partake at once.

Midway through we found that the dialogue could not be heard so we on the fly connected headphones and afterwards we did not have this complaint any longer.

In the last few days I sent this message to my team as our time management was of most importance 

  “ Just letting you know, I want our project to be finished on Thursday night and for us to at least get some extra play tests in before that even if it is just act 1  Thomas gets to relax which with ya mental health and shit you get I may get Patricia to do the choice buttons as it seems Remmy has already got enough editing to do. I also noticed that Matt's group had a good display up showing their design process and i reckon Sophie and Jordan can do a poster or a few images showing our process and how different choices effect the outcome of the film “

Today we grouped up together to align each other at where the project is t, unfortunately most of our team members were focused understandably on the due programming final assessment.

However I have made it very clear as to the expectations I have of them and when we need to get things done by. I’m nervous that we won’t be finished by open studio but if we work hard it should definitely be possible!

Today Remmy and her acting friend Charlie alongside Patricia and Jordan gathered at my house for the last time this project. It all went very smoothly as I spent time managing the shot list with Patricia on camera as usual. 

After taking time to edit the shot list to fit with Act-3 we have kept on filming today, I’ve taken the leadership role in my team as I can bring the urgency and time-management skills we need to finish before the open day alongside an intensive filming schedule. This worked well today as I really forced the team to output a large amount of content and keep up with the strict time restrictions we have. 

I’ve begun highlighting shots in our google doc form for when they are completed and what days we need to do particular shots, keeping to the schedule should give Remmy an entire week for editing and also provide Sophie and Jordan the opportunity to play-test each act as the editing process is finished. 

On Thursday we gathered at my house to begin filming the the “at home” scenes of our interactive film and we plan to finish within this week. I was in charge of taking care of the set composition, Sophie kept track of the shot list, Remmy acted the main protagonist with Patricia and Thomas filming. We discovered the the dialogue for the confrontation was far too long and I spent time today refining it so it flows more seamlessly. I then got Thomas and Jordan to read it aloud to each other as they had not seen the script to check this flow. Through reading it I was able to pick up a few errors but was able to correct these quickly!

I also refined act 3 with Remmy to complete the shot list and find which videos are edited to particular decisions in the final version.

For my poster I wanted to describe my experience of creative-tech in both an abstract and concise way. For this I thought of the skills or mindsets I have had throughout this first semester, I decided that my most important characteristics which affect my experience personally is my creative manner of thinking outside the box, my passion to build and create things that are new to the world and my time management and project design. Since this is clearly far too long to put on a poster I took the few elements of Passion, Design and Creativity and created the quote: “Through passion, through design, through creativity.”

I used the photograph of a road to show that this semester has been a journey, I placed my quote on the road because I believe the quote represents the skills needed to last the journey. After talking to Ciara, who has more of a design background than me, I got advice on tiniting the colour of the photo, font selection and blurring. Changing the tinting to a slight green made the white text pop more while changing the font made it easier to read against the background while still making it look handwritten which gives it a more authentic ‘human’ touch.

After reading an article about bringing peoples attention to specific details in a photograph I discovered the blurring can help immensely to improve depth of field and to draw the observers eyes to a specific place (The Lens Lounge, ). I decided to blur the edges of the photo to cause the users eyes to be drawn towards the quote and to also create more of a three dimensional view of the road.

Poster and photography created by using Canva, https://www.canva.com/

Yesterday I put myself into a very determined mindset to finish the code and ended up staying up late finishing Act 2 far ahead of schedule, which did lead to a very tired ICT session. However this lead to me being able to help out our playtesting team as they were running a bit behind on schedule. I performed 4 playtests and while most feedback was positive there were a few main ideas that I discovered that we need to keep in mind. 

◘ Clarify what choices effected what at the end of the film

◘ Seems weighted towards the academic route - (This is what we were aiming for)

For the past two days we have been writing the storyline for our choose your own adventure film, Remmy has started to build a script for when we begin filming and from that I have started a verbal playtesting script which hopefully will be finished by Friday and hence ready to play-test on Monday next week. 

The writing process so far has been working well when all team members are attentive and creating ideas to put on our “flow chart” but does slow down when people get distracted. In future we may need to just assign the writing role to two people so everyone else can work on other aspects such as playtesting or in my case creating the programming “Foundations” for when we assemble the final product.

Today we dropped upon innocent volunteers the opportunity to write the 5 most stressful experiences that they had encountered within a time limit of 15 and 30 seconds. This was to discover how people acted under pressure/stress due to different time limits because we plan to experiment with them later in our project. I discovered that for the shorter time limit (15s) people would begin to panic and experience memory block, the longer time limit (30s) still kept test subjects under pressure however they were able to get more ideas down in the first 15 seconds than their previous peers. This change is something we must keep in mind when implementing time limits as we would need to keep the user from freezing and panic choosing an option.

After talking with both Charles and Yvonne we created the question “What idea have you grown up to consider being successful?” This relates to the content we want to illustrate to the user as it is the main factor that builds pressure upon young people in terms of expectations and achievement.

We also begun creating basic story elements that we need to expand upon, In particular, the explanation of the setting, creating an attachment to the protagonist and different outcomes of the story.

After finding our research on different experiences that highlight the importance of choice and how they make these choices, we decided to move onto finding an issue we wanted to represent. We started by brainstorming all the different issues that each person wanted to represent and then took a vote to decide on our issue which is now “How unrealistic expectations are making youth develop anxiety and depression.” Simply voting worked well because it meant that we could quickly eliminate issues while still maintaining the combined intent of the group.

We also began forming potential playtests to perform on Monday that focus on choice and our issue together, we plan to reconvene as a group to refine the playtests on friday.

After defining our skillset and our purpose for the Signal project yesterday, we found that when we reconveined we were met with a dead-end. To solve this we played charle’s exercise to mass produce ideas situated around choice alongside previous experiences such as movies or games based on choice.

This left us with a large variety of ideas that we sorted into several categories to maintain some sort of order. We took a step back as a group and decided to pick a few choice based experiences each and research into what made the choices more dynamic or thoughtful. I expanded upon The Stanley Parable game and discovered that the creator aimed to have “seemingly simple structure opens up a garden of forking paths, opportunities for the player and the narrator to subvert their own expectations.”