#material explorations

We dedicated Friday (2/10) to explore materials, shapes and “housings” for our object to see what would convey the personality and expressivity of it the best way possible. I realized when showing our project to other peers in the class they had troubles seeing all the interesting aspects of it that I do. I realized that a lot of the objects interesting aspects are only visible to me - because I’ve been sitting with the code and created all its patterns and behaviors. So how can we make the objects behaviors and personality more accessible? How do we make it more expressive? How can we convey what we deem as interesting aspects to others?

First of all, what aspects do I find interesting? I set out to explore temporality and integrity, and have, with these words in mind, created the personality of the object. I find these two notions of interaction design interesting because the temporality is necessary to interaction and the integrity is a part of distinguishing action from interaction. Through working with these notions in our project I also realized that temporality and integrity can go hand in hand in many cases - such as when I created the behavior to go from calm to impatient to more impatient over time without the object receiving inputs. I created the “surprise counter” that allows the input maker to surprise it three times, but then it doesn’t get surprised anymore, and I find this feature interesting because it embodies integrity and temporality as well. To indicate that the object won’t get surprised a fourth time I implemented a waning of the surprise pattern in form of reducing the brightness and duration for each surprise.

A further iteration of this feature would be to see if we can make variations of the surprise pattern more than just reducing the brightness and duration of the sequence. This is something I would like to set out to do, but I need to make sure we are on track with the material aspect of the project first.

The different forms of temporality and integrity of the object is what I find most interesting, but I’m struggling to be able to convey it in the best possible way. As mentioned we dedicated Friday to explore different materials along with the light. I started to experiment with projecting the light onto different surfaces. This was something I early on found interesting (such as the example with the dishwashing-machine projecting the duration of the washing sequence onto the  floor through lights), but that I, through quick and easy explorations, now have troubles with seeing how it can help the object convey its personality through.

Projecting light onto paper:

Projecting light onto table:

I didn’t find it interesting because it’s not very expressive. At best it’s just a circle on a surface. Projecting the light onto a surface would be different, and probably more interesting, if we got to create shapes instead of patterns. So moving on from that we tried switching from green light to red instead because we feel as though that light shines brighter, and we turned to shapes and baking paper. We have had the idea to put the object into a shape for a while now, because we like the ambiguity that comes with shapes. We tried asking a few peers of what they thought of squares, triangles and cylinders, and they had no concrete associations (except that they found the cylinder similar to a toilet paper roll). Hence, the shapes beds for ambiguity that each can interpret as they wish, without preconceived ideas such as a cat-looking object would give.

I really liked the effect baking sheet gave of the light, it feels almost as if it enables the light to become a surface rather than stay in its circular shape. In this example ^ we use a quick prototype of a square and baking sheet over the opening to let the light out. I would like to see the whole square light up like the opening did, and conducted a small and easy experiment to see how the light patterns would project like if it was only beneath baking sheet:

We agreed on that the baking sheet makes the light appear bigger and more expressive than when it is on the breadboard. The patterns are more accessible and are easier to see. It’s probably even easier in the dark, but this is something we haven’t tested due to wanting it to be expressive in light environments as well. We then moved the light under a cylinder shape (that I find looks like a spaceship):

And realized that the effect of projecting light under an object is kind of cool. There might be something interesting here? That you don’t see the object itself, you just see the effects of the light somehow. This might go well with our rather surprise-able object that’s afraid of the dark? It might give a better sense of the “scared little animal” aspect of our object. To bake in the baking sheet together with projecting the light from underneath the object I took the liberty to cut open a plastic cup:

After this experiment a peer student (Christina) pointed out that we can tweak the baking sheet in numerous different ways to make the emission of the light different depending on which angle you’re looking at it from: