Fourth Year: A Well Deserved Shake Up

I thought everything was going well. Hang on, that isn’t quite true. I thought everything was going ok, but not bad. My dissertation was finished, I am just waiting on getting it printed. My main project was sort of coming along decently too, right?

Wrong

As is the way of the current project this semester, there seems to be a lack of joined up thinking between all parties and it isn’t doing anybody any good. On the plus side for this course though, it is the first year they have run it like this and there will inevitably be teething problems.

The problem which arose today during a well needed conversation with the lecturers was that I was going in two different directions and it wasn’t helping with any part of the project. My hopes were torn to shreds then slowly pieced back together. It is a common thing this semester, these happenings, but I suppose this one is for the best.

I was to choose between the two different directions I was heading. The research/ethnographic stage this early in the process and the mainly idea generation based and prototyping direction. All my work so far has been pointing to the idea generation/prototyping area so that is the direction that I am going to be going in from now on and the ethnographic decisions and feedback will come into it at a later stage.

My phase one plan will need to be updated to reflect this. Even more so because, due to working on the dissertation, I am a about a week behind in it.

I am going to admit that the way I was working, whilst not totally evident to me at the time, was a failure. It wasn’t really the way that I should have been working, but I think that I would have been able to have made it work if I had gotten some properly good feedback today. Nevertheless, I am going to take the comments on board and get cracking making some prototypes that will hopefully be robust enough as to be able to be used in the sleeping environment by some people in the next week or so.

Fourth Year: Prototype Planning

Here is the planning for the third idea, or as it is known as, the runaway robot. The way I think this project is going to end up going is not in the mobile device but rather the robotic arm which utilises proximity sensors to move the phone away from the user when they go and reach for it.

Fourth Year: Idea Five

The fifth and final idea of the five that I have taken forward from my 100 ideas. This is by no way a strong idea but I will give it the same sort of consideration that I have given the others, and if things go well for it, it may even be taken forward.

The main idea for this one lies once again in the Avoiding Discipline camp, but as I have mentioned before, the two areas of Avoiding Temptation and Avoiding Discipline were very similar. The basic principle of this is that a device detects if you are using your phone in bed and it automatically, but secretly, uploads an embarrassing photograph of you somewhere on the internet, and you are none the wiser about what happened. When someone finds it and calls you up on it, you should feel shame and start to use your phone less in bed.

It is verging on playing with human behaviour, which in itself is a very large and quite scary area to think of going into, but it should be manageable.

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Fourth Year: Idea Four

The fourth idea is another rejigging of an idea that I have previously mentioned from the initial idea generation session. The smashing lightbulb is what is sounds like but there are some differences that have hopefully made it more appropriate to the avoiding temptation rather than avoiding the discipline of using technology in the sleeping environment.

The changes to this idea include a proximity sensor. After you have switched the device on and have put the piece of technology into the holder, if you reach for it in order to pick it up, an arm will start to swing and if you actually manage to pick your device up, it will smash the lightbulb. If the user changes their mind whilst aiming to pick up their tech and withdraws their hand, the arm will reset.

It is almost considered to be a rehash, but there is something about this idea that I just can’t keep away from. It probably stems back to second year with my radio which featured a lightbulb as a prominent feature of it…

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Fourth Year: Idea Three

The third idea of the five that I have taken forward from the 100 ideas. This one has remained unchanged from the initial idea generation session a month or so ago and was the inspiration behind calling it Avoiding Temptation.

The basic premise behind this idea is a robot that will run away with your phone or other piece of technology if it makes a sound or if you try and pick it up. It is saving you from yourself in a way. Another idea which this could be turned into instead of a robot is some sort of arm that holds the phone and whenever it goes off, it moves the phone further away from you and once it reaches a certain point it will drop the phone into a conveniently placed bin. A little drastic yes, but it is the same sort of idea that occurred in the second idea too where if your phone went off a certain number of times, it would turn red, this one will drop your phone into the bin.

This is a very simple idea and would do as it is supposed to and would be obvious, but on the other hand it might be too simplistic and there are similarities behind this one and ideas from previous years. But it is a possibility and it can be developed.

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Fourth Year: Idea Two

I know I have been a little late in writing up the rest of my ideas, but fine tuning my dissertation has taken priority over the past few days, and I am in the annoying position of feeling as though two of the ideas that I have taken forward are useless. This has meant that I am going to have to go through my ideas again and try and find out which ones really are the better ones.

Nonetheless the three others that I still like are still going to remain, so here is number two. The social lamp.

The idea behind this one is inadvertently making aware that people are keeping you up at night and with some persuasion, you could get them to stop so you can sleep, unless you just switch your phone off altogether. The users phone is placed into the device and whenever it receives a message, whether it be a text, phone call, email or a notification from a social networking site it causes the bulb to light up brightly, keeping you awake.

Bringing the theme of (light and) colour back into it, I was thinking that after a set amount of times that the phone has gone off, it can turn red to show that what you are doing is going to be detrimental to your sleep and encourage you to do something about it. On the whole it seems like it is more to do with one of the other briefs that I had created, the Avoiding Discipline one, as it is keeping you up at night. However, in the long run, I think it would help to avoid the temptation of using your phone in bed.

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Fourth Year: Updated Phase 1 Plan

An updated phase 1 plan that incorporates the sleep diary. It is also slightly more specific.

Fourth Year: Ideas Day 2011

Yesterday (November 1st 2011) was Ideas Day 2011. The day in which in the past few years, people from industry have come up to Dundee to see the work the Product Design department has done and to, in a way, collectively brainstorm, question, praise, etc, all the ideas that have been completed by the students and find out which direction they are to go in or what is the preferred direction they are to go in for the rest of the year for their personal project. I’ll point out now, that these are my thoughts of what happened on the day and they may have become a little scrambled over the course of the long day, and I’m just telling it as it is.

In past years there have been names from large companies making an appearance such as from Nokia, but due to changes this year, there were less leading industry members (from large multinationals) and there was a stronger focus on what could be considered to be more relevant people to the product design students, but also to the interaction design students who of course, have been merged together for the fourth year.

The Guests

Here is a list of all the guests (and where they are from) who made their way to Dundee for the purpose of Ideas Day:

• Tim Regan: Microsoft Research
• Chris Van Der Kuyl: brightsolid
• Martin Bontoft: Design Research and Facilitation
• David Bain: DC Thomson
• Ade Murray: Prototypes and Installations
• Pablo de la Peña: Interaction Design Graduate
• Kate Saunderson: Lecturer for Design Ethnography
• Tom Metcalfe: Product Design Graduate
• Michael Shorter: Design Researcher

On top of this list, other people from the course were spoken to as well along with master students and a variety of other students who found their way into the room we were in.

The Day

Unlike previous years, we had to present three boards that were relating to the direction that we wanted to go in, whereas previous years had to show 100 ideas to the visitors and hopefully by the end of the day get a clearer idea of the direction they would like to go in. Along with that, the interaction design are now with us so there was a large number of people who were looking to speak to the visitors.

The day was split up into three parts which eventually became two. In the morning, the visitors/students were free to talk to each other about their projects, after a lunch break of an hour, this resumed for what should have been a further hour and a half. At half past three, when the ‘mingling’ was supposedly to end, there was meant to be a Q&A session with the guests, but this was cut from proceedings as many of them had to leave early, which is a shame really.

So without further ado, I will give a brief summary of each person who I spoke to and what they said in regards to my projects.

Martin Bontoft

Martin was the first person I spoke to, and luckily I was the first person that he spoke to as well. He came into the room via the door I was standing next to and I made my move early, and did the James May-esque move of “Hello”. Martin, from what I can tell form the “menu” that was created for the guests about each of the students projects before hand, used to work for IDEO and has become very successful in the field that he is in. He was very knowledgable and provided many a good insight about work he had previously completed that bared some resemblance to my project. He asked thoughtful and thought provoking questions that managed to help me to start narrowing down my idea choice.

He spoke about a project that he worked on regarding redesigning the interiors of British Airways planes, and said that for people to get good quality sleep, it wasn’t necessarily the physical constraints of the cabin that prevented good sleep, it was the ambience of the cabin. He also said it would be good for in the case of my project and the nature of it, it would be good to use myself as a research tool in the beginning, but later on it would be more beneficial to begin using others, partially this was due to it being quite a personal issue that not everyone has, but because the area of my projects (using technology in the sleeping environment) tends to be more for younger generations rather than older ones.

He left me with one piece of advice which should really prove useful in the rest of the project. You should know what to research, record and prototype but you should also know that your project could end up taking a different direction to the one you had hoped it would.

Andrew Cook

Ok, fair enough, Andrew Cook isn’t one of the visitors for Ideas day, and is one of our tutors for our normal classes, but he said to me that he would put his “ideas hat on”, and would give me his honest opinion about my projects. He had been seeing other  students about their projects throughout the day and the more honest opinions about my projects are better than none.

He said that the first brief that I have (Avoiding Temptation of using technology in the sleeping environment) has the most potential of the three, and that the use of light and colour (which was purposefully removed from the briefs to keep them as open as possible) could be reintroduced as a reward to the user. The second brief (Avoiding Discipline), was said to be too constricting and would probably not produce the same overall effect that the first one would. Avoiding Temptation had a certain ambiguity with it that could keep it between a commercial product or a critical design one whereas, it would be difficult to turn the Avoiding Discipline project into a commercial project from a critical design one.

Pablo de la Peña

Pablo is a graduate of the interaction design course and is currently a freelancer based in London. He was looking over my boards when I was taking a seat, reflecting and making notes of what had already been said to me and I quickly got up to speak to him. I wasn’t expecting him to be as much help as he was due to him being from the interaction design side of things but he provided me with some of the richest pieces of information from Ideas day.

His overall opinions about the briefs were that the first one is good, the second one has potential and the third one wasn’t really that good, but luckily I agreed with him with the third! He said that it is something that he had problems with too for a certain extent, but due to some factors it isn’t such a problem for him anymore.

When he moved into the flat he is currently in, he didn’t get a signal in his bedroom and when he put his phone next to the radio it made that noise radios or speakers do when a phone is placed next to them when it is sending/receiving/searching for a signal so he put his phone into “airplane mode” because he wasn’t getting a signal anyway. Soon it became second nature and his phone would be put into airplane mode when he was in bed because of the interference with the radio and that no one could speak to him on the phone without a signal. When he stayed with a friend who did get signal in their flat, he still automatically put his phone into airplane mode even though there was a signal. He has said that, as a result of doing this, he has been able to sleep better, but using his laptop in bed sometimes plays havoc to this.

Discussing the laptop side of things, he discussed a programme or a plugin that can be downloaded for browsers that limits time on web browsers or certain sites and once the time has been used up, that is it.

The next things Pablo talked about was a project one of his course mates/friends had done. The friend had sent out texts telling you to delete things on your phone or your computer, such as delete your 25th person in your contact list, or delete you facebook/twitter account and you had to do it. If you didn’t do it, you had to reply saying why. He willingly deleted the person in his contact list but couldn’t delete his entire email inbox. This idea fittingly complements the Avoiding Discipline brief.

The final thing that was discussed with Pablo was the complete disconnection of technology by the user and he said it would be good to attempt to see what the effects could be. He said that a friend (I can’t remember if it was the one who did the text campaign/project mentioned above) had done this and found that because he wasn’t getting in from work or uni and going straight onto the computer to facebook because he had nothing else to do, he had become more social and had gone out more to be with friends and was generally more productive. Pablo said it would be good to see what the effects would be if I had tried it, but there were obviously limits as to how much technology could be ignored.

As a parting note about Pablo, he liked the idea that your phone or laptop could be put into an object (that could be designed to look like an antique or obviously showing it is to stop you using gadgets in bed) and it could be on some sort of time lock. If you tried to get into the box during the time lock, it would lock you out for an even longer period of time.

Tim Regan

Tim was one of the people who I particularly wanted to speak to, not really because he works for Microsoft, but because he potentially looked into projects that covered this area. Unluckily, just before he spoke to me, he was given a hurry up as he had been speaking to everyone for a decent period of time and they were running out of time until the Q&A session (which was still going ahead at that point). I didn’t really get that much information from him or any groundbreaking opinions because of the ‘hurry up’ but he did throw another idea into the mix.

The possibility that the project could be turned into a group venture where there are a group of you trying to help each other into turning off technology collectively. This could ultimately turn the project into something a lot greater but possibly more complicated than I could manage in the timescale of the project. If I think about it, it is possible that it could become integrated with social networks to a certain level that you could be helped by your friends, or even strangers to try and get sleep, but this could be abused by many and some who could use it to keep you awake. Unfortunately this idea does sound a bit like someone else’s project in the class and I do seem a little skeptical about it as it could turn into the project that was done by someone in previous years, but it will be explored nonetheless and, you never know, it could be the thinking behind the idea which is implemented.

I asked him if he had done any work into this already since technology has become much more involving over the years and he said that he had done something similar but in the realm of meetings. He said that when he was in meetings in the US, people would spend most of their times fixated to their laptops and occasionally throw something into the meeting rather than focus on what was being said in the meeting all of the time, and they tried to devise a way of limiting the amount of time they looked at their screen, or tried to determine the optimum time for people to spend looking at their screen.

I got the general feeling that he was getting bored (Update: in the comments below, he has pointed out he was a bit brain dead after looking at 90+ ideas which is rather understandable!) of looking at peoples projects at this point, however I did get to speak to him and I got some feedback which is always good no matter what the circumstances are.

UPDATE: Here is a link to the research paper about the meeting scenario that was mentioned courtesy of Tim Regan who has posted below. Thanks to him for that! LINKY HERE

The paper will be added to my research for this next phase of the project, which after this week were I am taking it easy after the previous couple of intense weeks, it will all begin again.

Overall

Overall the day was quite good but in some ways equally disappointing. There seemed to be a strong divide in the class yesterday. There was very little mixing of Product Design and Interaction design with people going off into their own little groups, but this is usually the case but in the context of it being quite an important day, I’d have thought more would have been done by each party to resolve this.

It was quite a long day too, we were stationed in the room from about nine in the morning until almost four, and it seems obvious when I say this, but was difficult to try and get the attention of any of the guests with many of them gravitating to certain people who spoke to them for a very long time and you could tell peoples egos were getting far too large. However, I won’t complain too much about this all as it still was a very good day.

It was very good to get feedback from a few people and I do know the sort of direction I would like to go in and which brief I should use. Some of the best opinions came from a few other students, namely John Paul whose boards were located to mine and a few masters students who I had the chance of speaking to.

Lastly thanks to the guests who made their way to Dundee for the day, it of course would have been nothing without them.

Fourth Year: Week 7 Summary

Each time I write one of these summary posts I have to check and see what week number it is, not because I am forgetting, but because it seems to be going quite fast and I am tempted to put a lower number. Anyways, this week was the last week before Ideas Day so preparations were in full swing (to a certain extent) and dissertation work took a big leap forward. So without further ado, here is the week summary for the seventh week:

• Monday: Studio day. Yet again not much happened. It really was the final checks for the presentation boards that showed the three briefs that we were going to be taking forward. I got my boards read over and was told that part of it contradicted another part, so that was quite easily changed. The layout of the boards didn’t really change much since the initial ones that were created, which was fine as I quite liked them the way they are.
• Tuesday: Second studio day of the week and the last day we would see the tutors before the following week (unless we went and found them to speak to them) As always, not much happened. The tutors went round the class just giving last thoughts on the boards and some things to think about for the following week. No further changes were made on this day but it all ended up for the best. After class, there was a talk by Brian Loudon, a designer, who talked about various different forms of sketching. The number of people there was quite small, with the number attending being less than ten and only two of those were fourth years. The talk was good if a little short but informative none the less.
• Wednesday: From what I can remember I spent the morning in my room finishing off the in text referencing of my dissertation and in the afternoon I went to the art school library to get them finished. I didn’t, but because I was on a roll, at about 7 in the evening, I went to the main library in order to get them finished and was there until just after 10. During the day I also bought some bits of board so I could mount my presentation boards on them for the following week.
• Thursday: Not a lot happened on this day. The morning was spent helping someone in the photography studio. This took a couple of hours. From 1 until about half 1 I was in one of the IT suites in the Tower Building getting introduced to the Dundee Graduate Skills Award and how to get it. This is an optional thing and it something that is probably worth getting or considering. It should help make me more employable come the time I have graduated. In the afternoon, I headed back to the studio in order to get one last piece of feedback from the tutor who had not spoken to the side of the class I am on for about three weeks. The minor changes meant I was not able to get the boards printed off in the afternoon and instead had to wait.
• Friday: Pretty much as soon as I had woken up, I legged it into town to the print shop to get my presentation boards printed. No sooner than I had made it back to the flat, I was getting a lift back home to spend the weekend there.

That was the week. And I am a bit annoyed at myself that I didn’t write a couple more posts during the week, but I am thinking that week 8 will be much more interesting and I should get some interesting pictures from Ideas Day along with feedback from the visitors to the department.

Fourth Year: Week 6 Summary

So here we are at the end of week 6. November, and therefore ideas day, is frightfully close and there are only about 7 months left until the end of the project. That still seems like a long time, but the way things are currently going, it doesn’t quite seem like it is going to be enough at the speed that we are going at. So without further ado, here is what happened in week 6.

• Monday: A studio day where our main tutor was still absent. He was off the previous Tuesday because of some sort of illness, and he was still off with it all of this week. Our workload seemed to drastically plummet and yet again we still do not know for certain what we were to have achieved for that day specifically. We went over the three briefs that we had created for the Monday. Luckily, my three were alright with minimal changes needing to be made. The big question of whether or not light and colour was going to remain a part in my project became very apparent after the big decision to exclude that theory from the three briefs at the moment. The way I am tackling it is that I am going to step back from light and colour at the moment, but go ahead and try and incorporate it once again when I have done some more idea generation/development… hopefully. A chunk of the time in the studio was spent making the Dan Wheldon picture I have already posted.
• Tuesday. Another studio day. After the one to one tutorials we had the day before we were given another thing to think about with the briefs. We had to think of our values as a designer and determine what the values of the three briefs were and try and match the design language used to our design values. Now, design values were something we had gone over in second year and it was confusing, and yet again, two years later they are still very confusing. I am not the only person to think they were confusing though. Most people didn’t have much idea of what to do and have elected not to make any changes for the following week. I am undecided what I am going to do, I made my brief boards in a style that I think reflected my values as a designer, making them simple and clean without too much information, and the ideas that they are portraying. What I have decided that I am going to do for the following week is to just spend some time fine tuning them and just generally tidying them up. The afternoon was spent doing the Aston Martin DBR9 that I have already posted. Just after I had left the studio, I had received an email that would drastically shape what I did on the Wednesday.
• Wednesday. This non studio day was originally meant to be spent doing my dissertation in a final last push to get the third draft finished so it can be checked over and bound early enough so I wasn’t getting overly stressed by the 7th of December. However, the day before I got an email that changed my plans quite drastically, but I can’t say too much about it. I got an email to do some more work for Top Gear magazine, but it had to be done by 3PM on the Wednesday. I accepted the challenge and spent from 9 in the morning until 3 working on it. I cannot tell you what it was I was doing though (just yet)
• Thursday & Friday. Thursday and Friday have just merged into one really. I sort of did the same thing on each day, and that was spending time sorting out my third draft of my dissertation. I seem to have no motivation to get my work done this year but this is apparent amongst quite a few other people in the class. It doesn’t mean to say that I am not trying, I have been throwing myself at it and somehow never really seem to have too much time off, I have been going to the library for a couple of hours in the evening when I have felt as though I have needed to, but just don’t really seem to be making progress that quickly at all. That is probably because of a number of annoyances that I have had from other people but this is neither the time or the place to discuss that.

So there you have it, week 6. Despite it being a reading week we still had class and seemed to be the only course that was in. There are days that fly by and there are other days that trail on very slowly and I still wish that I had considered doing a different course to begin with. Ah well then!