Since the start of Phase 1 the amount of cardboard on my desk has been rising and rising. It wasn’t a mess per se, but it was a bit cluttered. My early start yesterday provided a good chance to change all that, and after filling up the paper bin and the normal bin before the day had even properly started, I have a clean desk. There is some things still on it, mainly card prototypes but you know it is much better than it was.
I kind of wish I had a before and after shot now…
After the last post about the image I uploaded here showing what one I was submitting for the degree show one, I found out after rereading the submission form that it had to be portrait and not landscape. This meant that I had to sift through my photos in Aperture again and pick one, make the changes and make sure it looked right.
Luckily it didn’t take too long as I could just copy layers in photoshop from one image to another. Here is the updated image that was submitted on Friday:
A description of the project also had to be submitted. Because this fits in nicely with the 100 words hand in at the end of the project, it was easy enough to make them the same. Here is the submitted 100 words, but they my be liable to change within the next three weeks.
Technology has become so embedded into everyday life that it is difficult to detach from it, especially for younger generations who often lose valuable sleeping time because of ‘being online’. 夜間 night* aims to discourage phone use in bed and aid the process of drifting off to sleep.
夜間 night* starts a soothing mood light when the phone is inserted, encouraging sleep whilst charging the phone. 夜間 night* will react to the phone when a notification or message is received by flashing brightly and vibrating, disturbing the user, questioning whether the phone needs to be on or not.
As promised in the previous post, here are the three draft briefs that I have created for the start of Week 6. They are all based on the larger idea of people overly using technology in the sleeping environment, such as people using their phone or laptop in bed and subsequently not being able to get a good night sleep. At the moment I am taking a wider view of it and then later on I will be bringing the idea of light and colour back into it even though I still am not sure if that is the way I want to take it all.
Brief 1: This brief was looking at how to avoid the temptation of using technology in bed. This was based upon the idea that came up in the 100 ideas a few weeks ago where when you went to bed you would put your phone or laptop on a small robot and whenever you switched the light off, the robot would run away taking the object with it in search of light because it was afraid of the dark. There were a few other ideas that fall into the same idea such as an alarm clock that would only work if you put your phone inside it so you were not using it.
Brief 2: This brief is looking at how to discipline people if they are found or caught using a piece of technology or gadget in bed. This area is slightly more biased towards critical design and would be something that say Crispin Jones would do. The idea that this spawned from was a lamp that would tell you what to do and if you did not do it, it would smash itself and turn the light off. Whilst this may not stop you from using your phone, it would force you to go and buy a new bulb or lamp so you would be punished for making itself break.
Brief 3: This brief was more a step into the unknown because I had the two that I liked, but I needed at least one more and this one seemed to fit the bill in that it sort of continued on from the other two briefs. The first was before, the second was during and this one was how to cope without technology in bed because you have become so used to it. This one is more focused on the light and colour idea than the other two at the moment and that is shown by the simplicity of the idea where I just said it was to help people get to sleep without their ‘safety blanket’ that was their mobile phone or laptop through the use of light and colour.
Another update to what I am doing with the Mclaren Blueprint. This time I am toying with the idea of making it like a technical drawing. I am still looking at doing the camera one which shows where cameras are usually located in racing games but I seem to have hit a dead end with that one at the moment.
This one was done very quickly using the raw ‘blueprint’ outline I got from the internet, if I took this one forward, I would go round the car in Illustrator as per my others:
Small update on the Mclaren, it is still a work in progress, and the idea is coming along nicely albeit a bit clunky…
Meanwhile the Mclaren I posted up last time is now my iMac desktop wallpaper.
A quick something that I have done, in preparation for another idea I am working on and have had for a while. Coincidentally, this has become another contender to be put on canvas…
A Mclaren Mk.II
The impending electronics drive is soon to start as soon as a soldering iron with a fine tip makes its way to me. Practicing PicAXE programming is the order of the day when it gets underway. One thing I would need for all this prototyping is wire, and to save it from getting tangled up in a big mess I made this… and I say made, all I did was make some holes in the plastic bit of this coffee jar and there you go, a wire dispenser.
The only thing I might end up doing is to make some baffles or rearrange the way in which the wire is wound just to keep them separate and not get tangled up, but for the time being it is very simple and works. What more do I need.
