#secondbrief

The second brief within the physical project is as follows:

You must integrate your light into a physical object and create a physical interactive artefact that expresses (and encourages) one of these three values through the interaction: - Love - Hate - Desire

This brief introduces the shape of the artifact into the interactional attributes. Interaction with the artifact is no longer “just” about the relation between different actions and functions (Wensveen et al., 2004), but also about the physical shape, color and feeling of the artifact. This makes it possible to incorporate i.a. affordances, constrains (feedforward) and a metaphorical context into the design of the interactive artifact.

Our solution to the first brief actually matches this second brief. We could simply build our sleeping LED-concept into a doll or teddybear, and it would express the value of “love”. But of course we want to challenge ourself and further explore the interaction possibilities in this new brief. We are still aiming for the theme of “love”, but instead of a teddybear we want to make an interactive lamp. Our initial idea is a lamp, that responds to the user caring for it and showing it love.

Choosing the right object

We needed an object or shape, that invited the user to care for it. First we explored different shapes for a traditional lamp, but we soon realised, that an untraditional shape might be more appropriate. We ended up with the idea of a potted plant, where light shines out through its leaves. A house plant is organic and alive. It also depends on someone taking care of it by giving it water and light. You are used to taking care of a lamp - but of course you are not used to a plant functioning as a lamp.

Finding the right personality analogy

We wanted the lamp/plant to express a profound personality, that asks for care. At first we thought a fireplace would be a natural analogy, because it needs someone to pile wood on the fire. But this personality was too simple - a fireplace has no real personality. Instead we ended up with the personality of a dog. This way the lamp would be loyal to the user if he took care for and loved it. This could be a relationship, that changes and builds up over time. The lamp could become attached to one or several persons.

References:

We were given the following new assignment:

Design an interaction that induces either: - Adventure - Peace of mind - Stress

This new brief asked us to design a certain interaction within the constrains of one pixel, and our starting point should be one of the three suggested experiences. Thomas and I decided to work with the experience of stress, because it seemed to allow more active interactions than “peace of mind” and fitted more easily within the one pixel constrain - as opposed to “adventure”.

This second brief gave us another point of departure than the first one - namely an experience. The first brief within the one pixel project asked us to design a way of interacting with two different light blinking patterns. This way the first brief partly dictated what Lenz et al. call “the how”: How a user should be interacting (Lenz et al., 2013, p. 127). In contrast to this the second brief focused on “the why”: The experience derived from the interaction. So now our job was to find out what interactions induces “the why”: The experience of stress.

References:

My next brief is based on relationships between two or more people, whether it be a married couple, a family relation, or a friendship. I think the difference between this brief and the last is that it requires us to get much more intimate shots of the models, essentially making it more difficult to capture that specific moment of interaction between two people.

For this brief, at least one example of flash is required in one of our shoots, to help us develop our skills and start practicing with new technical elements.