Category: Tangible & Embodied Interaction

Project Summary + Reflection

Our Design Approach

For presentations, Daniel had requests for every group to explain the design approach for our AI instruments, what actually happened as well as what we could have done differently. Therefore, in this cluster I will be reflecting regarding that.

This week, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier entry, is quite a hectic week for many. For some, there are re-exams to complete and submit by Monday, as well as our pitch for the second module to complete on the same day. While this is all going on, we have to submit our up-to-date journal by Friday as well, the same day as our last day of presentations. Therefore, I thought to myself that by making our lives easier maybe it’s best to aim for finishing everything earlier in the week, to provide more time at the end to journal & think about the pitch.

That lead to us not having a constructive ideation session. Rather, we tinkered with the possibilities of Processing, Wekinator and Arduino code, as well as the different serial inputs Arduino is capable of. In addition to it being an outcome of trying to save time, I actually thought it was better way to go— by tinkering first with technology, since we didn’t know what the code was capable of as of yet, I thought it was better to tinker first rather than setting a goal first and working towards that.

How did we approach this brief?

We established communication between Wekinator and Arduino by translating serial Data inputted from the Arduino into serial data for Processing for Wekinator to listen to on 6448. We tested different input components, like the potentiometer, buttons, and finally light sensors. We explored the interaction of the instrument quite a bit, going from one to three light sensors because we wanted a more complex and perhaps even collaborative experience. Then we recorded and trained the program etc.

Looking Ahead

What could we have done differently— if we had more time, or if we decide to come back and push this concept to another level, we talked about changing the look of the physical instrument in order to make the experience more collaborate, such as having a whole jar that represents a whole choir. We also discussed about training the program a little more or figure out ways to add nuance to the sound, as people were walking and trying out our instrument during the week, we noticed that people would try to manipulate the sound by letting a little light only and then move the lid up slowly and see if anything would change. But we only trained it so that as soon as any light is shined through the sound would begin playing.

We also discussed about adding a whole orchestra with other instruments, since it was difficult with the code we were using that required a constant sound. We tried using a timpani as a bass but it didn’t sound good at all, for example. The rhythm was too quick so the drum was getting cut off 0.3 seconds in.

Maybe adding different inputs like pressure sensors that can manipulate other aspects of the sound like the pitch or rhythm. Not only can other aspects be manipulated, the overall interaction would be more complex and dynamic.

AI Noise Ensemble

Crazy concoction of music! Not sure if this was meant to be pleasant to the ears at all, but having 5 groups with identical drum machine output and another with loud brainwave oscillator sound outputs was not gonna create a nice, harmonious music ensemble. Which I guess is why Daniel named it the Noise Ensemble instead.

Initial feedback from external guests. Many were curious as to how our jars functioned, peaking into the lid. We always had to explain “haha, it’s light sensors!” One girl commented that our instrument was her favorite, because our output / music produced was actually pleasant to listen to.

Presentations + Feedback

Many groups played with the technology offered by Leap Motion, one group stood out to me. Many groups simply played with different hand gestures without thinking about meaning behind those hand gestures. Manuel et. al‘s group however, really explored the gestures of Scratching that DJs perform in gigs. They used the same drum machine output we did, but swapped it into DJ sounds and trained multiple training gestures.

Felix et. al‘s group used the same technology as we did, the Arduino, which is why I also found their project to be intriguing. They designed a miniature violin that utilized both light sensors and pressure sensors to manipulate sound. I liked their project because essentially if we were to continue our project, we would’ve added additional sensors to establish more nuance in our sound, and we have contemplated about adding pressure sensors.

Our presentation didn’t receive feedback from anyone other than Daniel himself. Over the week, Daniel had demonstrated enthusiasm over our project. He had constantly been checking in with our group, asking how we’re progressing as well as showering us with complements regarding how he enjoyed the direction we took with his project. For the presentation, he recommended (following-up our own reflection) that yes it’s indeed an option to make the instrument more collaborative by increasing the space for interaction, perhaps the jars being larger in size, spaced out, and MORE! Daniel also talked about adding a smell dimension that could potentially increase playfulness of our instruments. Maybe smell would also be released when the lid is lift up, which could add another dimension for our musical ambience? Overall, Daniel was quite happy with our project and really liked the approach we took to actually make a “nice” sound.

Seminar:

All the supervisors we have seem to prefer a unique format of teaching that suited both their theme of the week as well as their personal teaching style. Today for the Seminar, Daniel had the whole class be a part of the seminar, and without having a class-wide discussion, each group was assigned to a question where they get discussed first privately within the group than publicly with the whole class. It was a more casual format of a seminar, but I enjoyed the laid-back atmosphere.

Since I don’t want to simply copy down every group’s response to the assigned questions, I’ll only be writing down the topics that I found interesting that sparked valuable comments and discussions.

Technology & Art

Technology makes tools, art makes meaning. Group 1 believed that technology have been aiding arts in reaching new limits, and how technical application have a power in making art appear more compelling. They also mentioned how technology can be applied in art to be used for the purpose critique and critical reflection. This topic of the blurred line between technology & art reminds me of Kosara’s paper from last week as part of our literature. He compares artistic and pragmatic visualization, how they differ, but also how the link between can be blurred (Kosara 2007). They are arguably on the opposite ends of the visualization spectrum , etcetera. I think technology and art are mutual exclusive in the sense that they don’t necessarily require dependence on one another, but that doesn’t necessarily entail a rejection of collaboration.

Sound-Oriented vs Movement Oriented

A question that I submitted! I answered, based on knowledge gained from the literature itself, that with sound-oriented tasks, focus is drawn towards sound by interactive system. While for movement-oriented tasks, the attention is placed on the movement itself. Group 3 answered by saying that different motor levels are paid attention to when putting parameters into performing a certain tasks.

Auditory feedback for Sensori-motor Rehabilitation?

We discussed this briefly for our question as well when comparing effectiveness of using sound in therapy rather than visualizations. Group 4 responded by saying that auditory feedback benefits patients by stabilizing action in a feedback loop, conditions, and helps realign behaviors. Research has suggested the general enhancement of brain activity and plasticity thanks to auditory feedback.

Why is Movement Deeply Connected to Sound?

This was the question proposed for our group, after our private deliberation revolving the topic we concluded that movement is connected to sound first and foremost due to our biology. Looking at the human’s brain anatomy, numerous neurobiological and behavioral studies have demonstrated that there is close interaction between auditory and motor areas of the brain. And there is a clear correlation between the perception of auditory information and movement execution and control. This was demonstrated via an example that was mentioned in the paper— the finger-tapping example, it showed that as a result of increasing the tempo of a song, a person’s tapping rhythm adapted to the speedier tempo by tapping faster. Which evidently demonstrates that there’s some sort of synchronization between our body’s ability to perceive sound and general movement.

These seminar topics were ones that I personally found valid to the theme of the week and ones I figured were valuable to note down.

Updates:

Regarding our Project— Musical jars

I managed to get adding vocals to work🎶! After consulting Jesper from the group that was tinkering with the drum machine continuous output example— who have managed to add at least 10 additional outputs to the original code, I learned that with this example it was possible to swap out the .wav files into your own and also add additional outputs! Following his guidance, I modified the Drum machine Processing code, I added an additional row / additional sample. With four rows now, I swapped out the existing drum beat files to new files.

Finding nice vocals happened to be extremely difficult, it was hard to scavenge for raw, a capella vocal .wav files where only one note is sung for an extensive period of time. I went on royal free .wav file downloading websites and searched for choral music, but I never found four distinctive voice parts to incorporate into our program. With the help of my boyfriend, who has experience in music production, he composed a chord with four unique voice parts for me to implement. Because the four notes were too close to each other, I found an additional soprano voice to add on top of the voices he provided me to bring in a higher note for a more dramatic effect. These files all had to be 1 second long, since the drum machine was more susceptible to taking beats. If the files were too long the song would sound chunky / static-y, if short, the sound would appear to seamlessly merge with one another despite actually being separate beats.

After getting the vocals to work, we composed a system in which we would visualize how the interaction with the jars would be laid out / what sequence we should use to introduce each layered vocals. In the end we trained Wekinator to learn the Basic Jar sequence to the left:

• Default, when no lids are lifted— Bass note is played
• Big jar lifted— Tenor part played
• Middle jar— Alto
• Thin jar— Soprano

What was one of my concerns when laying out the sequence this way was that when one bar is played and the other jar is lifted, the first bar would be cancelled and stop playing. It turns out after training this sequence that they actually built on top of each other, which means even though we recorded each lid-lift separately, when they’re all lifted together, they all work by playing sound altogether.

Here’s our final outcome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J19UST4ggXY&feature=youtu.be

We went through some technical difficulties with the processing code constantly crashing, I still have a hard time getting used to how a whole program could refuse to stop working based on one small mistake like an additional right bracket }}, can someone invent autocorrect for code?? At some point the randomizing function stopped working, and also Wekinator could not listen to any serial input from the arduino at all and the drum machine also quit functioning. Turns out that we had missed one letter “f” in a piece of code, courtesy to Melika for noticing.

This week was great! We basically finished everything by Wednesday, which is something we have mentioned in previous weeks about improving— starting earlier to ideate and get to work earlier without pushing everything to the very end. I managed to learn a lot by myself just tinkering around with Processing code. I realized that with a lot of patience, programming isn’t that hard afterall.

This week was stressful in the sense that we have a lot of deadlines coming forth and I thought it would be smarter to leave additional time at the end of the week to give space to working for our other deadlines. My groupmates were very efficient in assisting each other in finishing the project ASAP, and I think we did a pretty decent job considering the little time we spent working on it. More reflections coming tomorrow!

References:

Bevilacqua, F., Boyer, E. O., Françoise, J., Houix, O., Susini, P., Roby-Brami, A., & Hanneton, S. (2016). Sensori-motor learning with movement sonification: perspectives from recent interdisciplinary studies. Frontiers in neuroscience, 10, 385.

Christopher, K. R., He, J., Kapur, R., & Kapur, A. (2013, May). Kontrol: Hand Gesture Recognition for Music and Dance Interaction. In NIME (Vol. 13, pp. 267-270).

Kosara, R. (2007, July). Visualization criticism-the missing link between information visualization and art. In 2007 11th International Conference Information Visualization (IV’07) (pp. 631-636). IEEE.

Macionis, M. J., & Kapur, A. (2018). ’Sansa’a modified sansula for extended compositional techniques using machine learning. NIME.

Follow-up from last post, after the workshop with Daniel, we coupled our Arduino board for it to send serial inputs via processing to Wekinator. First we tested on potentiometers, then Melika or Josefine came up with the idea of using light sensors. We decided that light sensors would add a different dimension to the interaction— mostly because it affords richer interactions, in the sense that the one interacting with the computer would not be needing to physically touch any component from the Arduino board. This play on tangibility where you can physically manipulate dark and light— but also not touch anything— would be an interesting interaction to develop and work with.

We started with one light sensor. Just like the potentiometer, we first checked if the Serial to Processing file was able to detect the Arduino input that change the value, and if it did, we would proceed by experimenting the interaction with a pre-made output.

After testing with one and seeing it worked, we tried with two, so two hands could both be involved in the playing of the instrument. That worked too.

Josefine strongly advocated for incorporating an additional light sensor, the more the merrier— she said. By including another sensor, we’re opening up an opportunity for a collaborative musical interaction, involving more than one person.

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Then it was time to ideate how the instrument would look! My first idea for our light sensor experiment was having a dark mystery box where you would reach your hand into the “unknown” to manipulate the music. The reasoning behind this was so that we could shine a light within the box so that the light source and its intensity would remain constant. But that was when we only had one light sensor in mind, if this box were to have multiple sensors, it would probably be difficult as an intuitive instrument, since you can physically “see” what’s going on.

Then Josefine proposed having three separate apparatuses that would contain the three sensors, we talked about more structure, boxed, rectangular prisms, but Melika and I mostly left the physical appearance of our instrument up to Josefine’s interpretation. I have good faith in Josefine’s prototyping skills so I was certain that she would create something we would all enjoy.

Whilst this was all going on, I was looking more into the code, tinkering and comprehending the code, and seeing if there’s any opportunity to switch out the music files so that we could also create our own songs in addition to simply creating a new interactive instrument. We were also influenced by our ambitious classmates with backgrounds in music production that were taking the drum machine example to the next level by adding their own beats and melodies. With a background in choral music and being part of choir since a very young age, I proposed swapping the .wav files into vocals, so we could somehow present a nice harmonization of different vocal parts and present that as a whole. Then, by manipulating the light sensors, we trigger the introduction of specific vocal parts. For example, we can train our program so that basses get introduced, then we introduce sopranos, then the tenors, and so on. Maybe even manipulate the sound by only having the sopranos and basses, the vice versa. At this point we haven’t thought too much about this yet, since I couldn’t figure out how to swap sound files in the All classifiers ChucK file.

Josefine created three cylinders of different sizes. These cylinders are capped with lids, so by lifting the lid, we introduce light in to trigger the light sensor, and vice versa. After hearing my idea of having different voice parts, she wanted to create cylinder jars of different sizes since her vision was that maybe we could have a deep sound, or a bass drum enter when the big jar was opened, then a high melodic sound be played when the thinnest cylinder was opened. She decorated these cylinders with traditionally woven ribbons that had tribal prints, so our instrument is not only functional, but also possesses an aesthetic appearance.

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Inside these cylinders, we have our light sensors mounted at the bottom, attached to foam we found around the IOIO lab. We extended our wiring via longer wires also found around the lab. And ta-da! Everything works just as we imagined.

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To put our music jars to the test, we set our output as the FMSynthesizer with the ChucK example. Below is a video of Josefine trying it out!

https://youtu.be/8AZe6CpD3ws

Last week, final brief of Module I!

Introduction to Wekinator & Brief

This week is all about Machine Learning & AI, but applied in an entertaining fashion! Using Wekinator— an open source software created for experimenters to utilize machine learning to create new musical instruments, gestural game controllers, computer vision, & computer listening systems. Wekinator can “listens” and receive inputs, whether external or internal in the computer (i.e Mouse XY), then process them to produce outputs.

By tinkering around with this newly introduced software, we open up conversations about how new technologies can augment creative work in the scope of music production.

The expectations from the supervisor is to explore and work with Wekinator and Processing, but to not limit ourselves with these softwares only— we can consider exploring Arduino, PureData, Leap motion, Computer vision & utilization of webcams, Brainwave detectors, Bitolino, etcetera. We are to tinker with the technology, explore, be open to having risks and failures but reflect on them, and also have fun!

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The goal by the end of the week is to explore the opportunities Wekinator is capable of, by creating a Human-AI Ensemble. I interpreted this as using the Wekinator software to create a new instrument and a novel interaction for playing / presenting music. On Friday, we will be presenting our musical concoction as part of a giant class-wide noise ensemble as well as presenting / reflecting on our design approach, process, and implementation of technology.

The outcome of the project will be part presentation and part performance, so coordinating an ad-hoc performance to demonstrate the concept behind the instrument.

The potentials of Machine Learning & AI in IxD?

Machine Learning is a powerful tool because these trained algorithms are able to apply complex mathematical calculations to big data, repetitively and in a faster pace thanks to recent development. This creates opportunities for Interaction Designers to train computers to learn about and recognize the subtle nuances more complex interactions enhance product development, gesture detection development, etcetera. This technology allows machines to deal with and adapt to fuzzier and more complex knowledge

Experiments with AI

Exploring with Google’s AI experiments

To kick myself off, I decide to explore on my own what Google’s creative lab has already managed to achieve using AI technology.

First I played with Quick, Draw, bult by Jongejan et. al from Google Creative Lab. Quick, Draw is a digital drawing game built to guess what you’re drawing. When you begin the game, you are prompted to draw something, and a neural network tries to guess exactly what you draw. The programme is getting better over time, since the more you draw, the more the program will learn. This is a good example of using machine learning in a playful way.

Then I experimented with the program Semi-Conductor, since it utilized a javascript machine learning library that we’re familiar with from Interactivity— posenet! Built by Rupert Parry and peers, it’s an experiment design to let you conduct your very own orchestra via your browser. The webcam utilizes computer vision / gesture detecture that targets your arms to change tempo, volume, and instrumentation. Since the week is all about music, I thought this would be a nice thing to look at perhaps serving as inspiration for our own project.

Main takeaways: This collection showcased really simple and comprehend-able experiments that gave a good overview of what machine learning is capable of in a playful way.

Tuesday: Workshop— Tinkering with Wekinator, using Arduino?

On Tuesday, Daniel opened with a workshop & tutorial of how to use Wekinator. Initially it sounded quite complex but as soon as we put it in action, the straightforwardness of the whole software interaction became more apparent. We are to download a Quick Starter essentials package, then, simply follow the title of each files, which was named as either an input or output together with the number of inputs or outputs, and also some indication of whether the type of output is all continuous or all classifiers. Then, when the correct information is inputted in Wekinator, we simply have to train the program into knowing which input behavior would trigger a certain output— for example, taking two outputs of sound & two inputs of mouse position as an example, we can train Wekinator so that it knows that when the mouse is on the left side of the screen, it should play a higher frequency, and when the mouse leans over to the right side of the screen, it would play a tone with a lower frequency.

Using the provided examples, Daniel demonstrate everything from the simple input of the position of the mouse on a window, to a ChucK synth output with four separate classifiers. I was quite quick in grasping how everything functions so moved on to tinkering with Arduino.

https://youtu.be/bGoQTkMhYuA

As mentioned earlier, it was recommended yesterday that we could think about experimenting with other softwares. My prioritized interest was coupling the Arduino, with no specific reasons as to why. I thought with our previous experience with Arduino, it wouldn’t be as challenging as the newly introduced interfaces like Leap Motion etc with out limited programming skills as a group.

Without being aware of there being code pre-made and available for us to use to couple Arduino, Processing, and Wekinator, I did some research online. I read somewhere that you had to have some sort of Wi-fi component to your Arduino to be able to connect to the browser, and freaked out a little. But thanks to Daniel’s reminder that there’s actually detailed instructions on the Wekinator website demonstrating how to do this, I quickly jumped into that instead.

I was able to swiftly connect the three softwares, done easily by simply uploading first the Arduino code to the board, then running a piece of code via Processing that receives serial port data from the Arduino and sends it to Wekinator— to port 6448 using OSC messages, then finally opening our selected output, which so far was basically any example output we wanted to use in the starter pack, and running Wekinator to compile everything together.

I tested whether the connection was established first via buttons, but the featured values didn’t show up at all, maybe because the buttons only afforded two inputs, either on or off. So I quickly swapped out the buttons out and attached a potentiometer instead. By coupling the potentiometer, I was able to see the featured value on the serial to processing file change from 0 to 1023, which means the Arduino serial data is indeed being sent to Processing data! I quickly took this to the test by playing with the 4 classifiers output. I trained Wekinator so that the greater the value is (the farther to the right that i twist the potentiometer knob) the more layers are added to our baseline drum beat. See what I mean below.

https://youtu.be/Nkx4UZyHYDA

This marks the start of us building our AI instrument. We basically finished building our instrument on Tuesday as well, but since this day was extremely long I decided to spread the post into two instead. See the next entry for our instrument.

References:

Google Creative Lab. Experiments with Google.https://experiments.withgoogle.com

This entry is dedicated to the wrap-up / final outcome of our project as well as addressing the feedback we received from the final presentation & reflections.

Wrapping-up: After we discussed the more abstract aspects of our concept, it was time to sketch it out and label our sketches using the Function, Behavior, Structure method. Prior to doing so, we formulated an opportunity statement just to specify systematically what we are trying convey in our project. We’re asking ourselves—

How can we provoke the audience by informing about gender inequality in the case of the female uterine cycle and its costs?

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💡 FBS 💡

1️⃣ Concept

We titled our project the Bloody Business Ferris Wheel, the description of concept being “Giving Malmö City Her Very Own Uterus”, again, in reference to how Malmö already has a famous male phallic figure. It will be a Ferris wheel that people can enjoy by going through the cycle, as well as experience the costs by paying a certain for the ride based on where in the cycle you are

• Placement we selected to be in the heart of Malmö city.
• Unity & Coherency: Informative, provocative, but also provides the function of entertainment.
• Durability: It would be a permanently mounted playful structure that can serve as a tourist attraction or a statement-piece that can represent Malmö. Sustainable building materials used.

2️⃣ Function

The Ferris wheel we’re envisioning of having is one that’s very loud in terms of being provocative regarding the message it’s trying to convey. It functions as a tool to raise awareness about how much females have to sacrifice economically to gain access to what should be considered as daily necessities, and to provoke the status quo of the topic of menstruation being taboo to discuss in public about as well as

• We are raising awareness regarding the female reproductive system / uterine cycle in relation to money.
• We are provoking the status quo by having a major female-represented structure— that’s commonly associated with innocence— in public.
• We are communicating data based on the average cycle, price, and uterus structure.
• We are attempting to change social stigma around periods by sharing a fun and liberating experience for people of all ages.

3️⃣ Behavior

Our structure has the basic function similar to that of an ordinary ferris wheel’s. It is an upright wheel that affords rotating, in addition to that, there are passenger-carrying components (we’re referring to as capsules) so that the audience can get a chance to physically interact with it by sitting in these capsules.

The behavior of the ferris wheel is powered by data— the data is drawn from an average menstrual cycle as well as the average cost women have been found to spend on products related to the uterine cycle. The cycle’s change in behavior is visualized by lights unique for each phase— pink for the proliferative phase, blue for ovulation, orange for secretory, red for menstruation, and brown for the final days of a period.

So how does this ferris wheel behave and how is it interacted with? It takes 28 minutes to go around— as an homage to the average 28-day cycle. The cost of the period cycle is provoked by the alternating price based on where in the cycle you are when you enter the ride (i.e when you enter the wheel when the ferris wheel is going through menstruation, you will be paying a much higher price than maybe the phase right after the period). We also briefly discussed about heat and smell components that can be implemented into each individual capsule which represents body temperature that fluctuates throughout the cycle as well as different scents women tend to emit in different phases. Essentially, every capsule goes through the full cycle of a 28-minute and individuals get to personally experience how it feels “every day”.

4️⃣ Structure

• A Ferris wheel that resembles a round abacus
• Steel construction, sustainable
• Stable Platform to hold up our construction
• Motors in the centre to power the ferris wheel
• Heating function in capsule seats 
• Scent diffusers to imitate bodily smell throughout the cycle
• Light displays via LED lights physically attached to the structure as well as projections being lighted from afar
• Decorative abacus pieces to pay homage to our original design idea

Information & Provocation

To Inform

• The period has for a long time been a shameful topic to talk about
• Public information about the menstrual cycle could make it more acceptable
• Data
  • In Sweden, and other countries like Germany— female hygiene products are taxed at 25%. It’s treated like a “luxury” item. Why isn’t it taxed like a daily necessity?
  • In average, women [in Sweden] pay 15.000-70.000 kronor on menstruation supplies throughout their lifetime.

To Provoke

• Connecting the menstruation cycle to a Ferris Wheel—a structure that been associate with fun, to lighten the mood regarding the stigma around uterine cycles, and the overall taboo of speaking about periods
• Building a huge and eye-catching attraction in the heart of Malmö
• Malmö has a famous gigantic phallic symbol, why not equalize the field

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Presentations + Feedback 💬

Inspiring Peers:

I really enjoyed Malin, Zakiya & Felix’s group as they selected a quite sensitive and intrusive topic regarding Domestic abuse, and to inform the audience about how a lot of cases go unreported. I admire their choice of physicalization, since it’s not a physical object that was the take for most other groups, it was a room where people experience. They chose gusts of air pressure that blow from the back into the room you step into to mimic the intrusiveness of the topic of domestic abuse, which makes it provocative. I liked how they incorporated unity by joining lights and gusts of air pressure as a whole for the audience to expose themselves to.

I also really enjoyed Andrej & Manuel’s project informing and provoking about deforestation, via a hallway lit up by lights. The physicalization is also an experience more than a physical object. The interaction is carried out by having a person walk down a hallway, performing the act of “planting trees”, which is symbolized by lights lighting up on the ground, until you reach the end of the hallway where you face a mirror, and you see the lights behind you dim back down, signaling how the trees are quickly being cut down as soon as you plant them. Then, as soon as you walk back everything is reverted back to dirt. I thought it was an interesting a metaphorical way of presenting the damages of deforestation (5:1 ratio— trees cut down : trees planted), there is a sensitizing value to it.

I notice a pattern after reflecting on what I liked from other groups— I believe that the physicalizations that you got to experience first-hand inflict more information and provocation were more appealing

Our Presentation:

When it came to our presentation, I quickly realized as soon as we started that we had miscommunicated a little before beginning when it came to clarifying our concept. Melika was absent on Thursday (yesterday) so she missed most of the changes we made to our idea, which lead her to introducing the presentation by introducing how our concept revolved around the concept of the tampon tax, or how sanitary products for women are taxed higher that of men’s. The fact that the tampon tax exists and this idea of inequality between what’s considered as daily necessities between men and women was what stirred up the conversation regarding cost.

However, we had agreed yesterday that we would only address the overall cost women must contribute to cope with different phases in the menstrual cycle— including sanitary products, painkillers, condoms, birth-control pills, chocolate for cravings, and so much more. This could have been prevented if we had clarified our concepts to each other better prior to our conversation.

Otherwise, we received a positive response regarding how provocative our concept was. The presentation went well, we got a few giggles here and there, I assume it’s due to the fact that some of the student’s backgrounds might not be as open-minded as the students born and raised in liberal Sweden. As most of us probably expected, some voiced out about how the introduction regarding gender tax was confusing because our Ferris Wheel FBS had nothing to do with the tax itself, but about the overall costs. Julija wondered why we made the physicalization so entertaining, without considering the darker aspects of the menstrual cycle, such as the pain you experience during your period.

We did touch on this a little during our concept refinement, regarding seatbelts that can simulate and impose pain, but we never pushed it forward in our final iteration due to how provocative it already is.

Mali only had nice things to say about our project, she light how we addressed an extremely taboo subject and showcased it in such a provocative way.

Final Reflections + Looking ahead:

• Maybe we could have done some sort of user-testing or surveying around to ask our peers whether they found our concept too abstract in the sense of the data presented being too hidden. Maybe also ask more for more personal / emotional feedback regarding whether our concept is too provocative.
• We could have iterated a little more about how the lights are presented, such as the transitions between different phases, as well as the behavior of our abstract uterus structure projection.
• If we continue with this project?
  • Using screens that are included in every capsule and have different genres of “films” playing— eg. period when one is more aroused: play pornography
  • Seatbelts that cause pain to mimic cramps
  • Including more dimensions regarding class and different social stigmas that exist around the world, ferris wheel presented in different ways based on which country we’re representing, etcetera

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This week’s theme is all about informing and provoking— using data physicalization. The week is led by Mali, an associate senior lecturer at Malmö university with a background in Product design, Industrial design, and Interaction design. Mali’s research and interests revolve around design in HCI including design for self-reflection and sustainability, forms and aesthetics of computing objects, as well as critical interaction design processes.

I had to be away Monday through Wednesday of this week, so a major part of this week was done independently in a distance such as reading the presentations, reading and reflecting on the papers, as well as doing some preliminary ideation for my peers to reference when conversing about the project when they meet physically.

Reading the presentation, the lecture was kicked off discussing the concept of data visualization. Data visualization, to be put simply, is creating a graphical representation of data, or according to the quote provided by Mali in the presentation, is “the use of computer supported, interactive, visual
representations of abstract data to amplify cognition (thought).” Think pie-charts and bar graphs. It’s closely related to fields like information visualization, scientific visualization, and visual analytics.

The aim of visualizing data is to augment the human in understanding data. Digital displays have clear strengths, where it’s capable of conveying visual imagery that is rich in details. Some people might not find an array of numbers intuitive, and a visual guide could potentially serve as an aid. However, the main challenge still stands where there is a lack in technique for turning abstract data into easily interpretable and perceivable representations.

Data Physicalization, on the other hand, facilitates reasoning by making data appear tangible so users can interact with it somehow. Humans can interact with digital information by using their natural capability of perceiving to physically manipulate objects and materials. Furthermore, adapting data “from flat displays into the physical world could create novel and useful ways of exploring, experiencing and communicating data.” It’s been commonly used for scientists, for example, to help solve problems.

Having these structures built help scientist and doctors first of all, investigate better because it’s much easier to interact with compared to simply analyzing it through a telescope. I imagine by interacting with these “viruses” in a dynamic way would help scientists notice more nuances and can benefit them in finding cures more efficiently. They could perhaps even modeled to act like how the real molecules would function, so they could even test with chemicals to see if they make an impact on the structure physically, before testing it on living organisms.

A branch of physicalizing data is making it dynamic, a method of making data physical is simply 3D printing some sort of structure, but a dynamic data physicalization can be interacted with, and interact with itself. They can be updated, or update themselves. Some examples are building blocks like legos that you can build and update yourself or a Tangible User Interface that combines physical components to digital.

Brief:

To Inform and Provoke—

Informing is all about providing information that is supported by facts and data. To create a physicalization that informs, we have to use specific statistical data in order to facilitate knowledge in spectators / give an overview of what we’re trying to show. It’s more passive and also general, in the sense that if a physicalization is only informative, it doesn’t direct towards any target group.

Provoking on the other hand, is all about being direct and calling forth for an action, it’s more demanding, contrary to informing being passive. A provocative artifact can have a character of delivery that’s provocative. It also inflicts emotion, which means it can give rise to a particular feeling.

The Brief of the Project:

The goal of this week is to produce a data physicalization that both informs and provokes. We get to select a specific area in addition to the ones Mali has proposed, which were Sustainability, Diversity, and Design Processes. There should be a unity in both providing statistical information as well as be provocative in the single physical object we build.

Each group must consider four main aspects and ensure that our concept meets all four—

1. Unity— including both information and provocation in a single physical product.

2. Coherency— being coherent as a whole. Form, behavior, color and provocation need to be in harmony.

3. Contextuality— need to be designer for and be suitable for a specific place.

4. Durability— be sustainable. It needs to have aesthetic and functional values that last in time.

For the presentation, we are to create a detailed FBS illustration to demonstrate our project, as shown below of the lung installation in Amsterdam that was shown earlier in this entry. We don’t necessarily need to build a physical prototype, but we need to demonstrate our knowledge of our project thoroughly by providing illustrations and detailed explanations

References:

Ghajargar, M. (2019). Data Physicalization: To inform + to provoke [PowerPoint presentation]. Retrieved 25 November 2019 from Malmö University

Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman (Eds.). 1999. Readings in
Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.,
San Francisco, CA, USA.

Like I mentioned in the previous entry, due to having to leave for abroad due to personal reasons, I wasn’t able to attend the presentation on Friday as well as the wrapping up of our smell game. Most of the information here that I’m providing regarding the project is all made possible thanks to my peers.

The material used for the Scratch n’ Sniff marks that represent the words was thin cardboard, the technique of encapsulation was executed using wood glue and a component of smell— in this case, the essential oils, rose water and orange blossom water provided by Simon, as well as two older perfumes provided by Josefine.

Scratch n’ Sniff seemed the most appropriate because as introduced in the class, it’s the best developed way of encapsulating smell, and it has been incorporated many times in board games. In the presentation he had mentioned that Scratch n’ Sniff is a “low-tech solution to the problems of distribution, synchronization and sequencing of scents in mediated experiences.” (Niedenthal 2012)

They printed labels for the name of each scent, representing the “word” aspect of With Other Words, the labels were then glued to each card. The scent was mixed in with glue and then painted over each card with their designated scents. The essential oils blended seamlessly with the glue, and when I tried the cards myself, I couldn’t detect the glue smell at all.

Regarding the presentation, I only heard scattered chats about what went down. Simon apparently didn’t give much attention to or critique our project, maybe because it wasn’t interesting to him, or maybe it was informative enough for him to have to ask follow-up questions. I wasn’t there so I’m not sure about what the atmosphere was like, but generally according to my peers it was quite awkward and a little underwhelming.

Maybe Simon could’ve provided feedback at all. Teachers usually provide feedback no matter how great or senseless projects are. That way, we would’ve known how we should tackle the next project, what we could improve on, etcetera.

 ✨Reflections ✨

This week was quite refreshing in the sense that we had a lot of fun exploring a new sense that people don’t usually think about alongside of interaction design / anything digital that involves design, reasons being that it’s a scent the most difficult to grasp. It’s very interesting to tackle a field that’s still in development that doesn’t have clear solutions yet. It was interesting to learn and “hear” about its potentials but perhaps the actual brief didn’t really take us to that level of understanding.

Regarding our week in hindsight, like I’ve mentioned in a different entry, maybe we could’ve started the process a little earlier, but the brief was also only revealed on Wednesday. However, most group already had quite solid concepts by Thursday so maybe that’s something we can learn from our peers, to not underestimating a brief and pushing it to the last minute no matter how “simple” it appears to be.

The workshop was no doubt the most interesting moment of the week, where we got to explore with different encapsulation methods. But it would’ve been more revealing it we would have gotten the opportunity to test with multiple encapsulation methods for our game, but given the sparse time, the direction we had to take was to quickly choose and idea and GO with it. That we didn’t do—which clearly bit us in the back this week.