Micro challenge 03

Working with Oliver to build the first part of our final design exhibit

Just like the first two micro challenges this week has been an intense week in which Oliver and I worked hard to create a design in which we could show the energy problem to people visiting our MDEFFest. We therefore spent more time working on the design interaction for the exhibit, and less on our actual thesis project during this week. However, what we developed will add to the visitors experience during our final exhibit.

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The Goal of the Week

When we started this week Santi made a point that we could see this in more of the side of Exhibit Design and Interaction of the people visiting our journey. We therefore brainstormed ways we could gather input from the people and which potential output we could generate based on this. In the end we decided to create a interaction at the start of our display that creates a sense of impact and interaction into the problem of energy. In the end we decided the following goals for this week:

The defined input is: A dial in which people have the power to determine the amount of energy being released based on what averages of other countries is

The defined output is: A group of household electronic machines that start turning on in relation to the energy budget set as the input. All of these things will create an overwhelming feeling of input and things like a tv or radio will give feedback based on the energy problem to the person at the dial
The defined interaction is: A way for people to interact with what energy entails and how in modern society we use energy. The interaction should be physical and make use of various senses like hearing, touch, sight.

The Process

We started with this challenge we discussed the steps we felt needed to reach the end goal, and which skills and things were needed beforehand. We wanted to work mostly on hardware during this challenge and get as much done for the display part of MDEFFest so that in the coming weeks we can focus more on further device and AI development. This is why this week was more focussed on the display, however as we didn't want to lose to much momentum we also scheduled moments to work on the AI infrastructure and PCB development for the physical devices of our design project.

Understanding The Code

One of the first steps we did was to create a comprehensive diagram of what we wanted the people to experience and which parts they would interact with and how these would then be influence by other interactions of code and hardware. From here we transformed this into a flowchart for the building of Arduino code which was actually quite a quite simple circuit. 
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Understanding The Circuit

The next part that we needed to understand in more depth was how the physical circuit for the electrical box that controlled the devices turning on and off would work. We had help from Aurel who explained how he made a similar box. From there we made a diagram for the circuit and got to work.

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Final Results

Display Dial 

The actual final display of the week was the dial setup and having classmates interact with it. The goal of this was to combine the code, electrical box and physical stand to create an experience in which the urgency of the energy issue is shown and people start to engage and think about what this is. There are still a few things we want to changem like the top poster we want to lasercut into the top plate so that it has a bit more of a clean feature. We also need to spend some more time considering what actual outputs we would like and how these could grow based on the amount of relays turned on.

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The Energy Box

In the end we ended up with an energy box connected to a second box that was able to work based on the angle of the dial on the setup. Based on the degrees the relays would turn on and as the angle went up more and more relays turned on. This allowed for us to control the output based on the dial the person was turning. Effectively taking the inputted movement of the person and outputting electrical current to devices connected. This in turn created a feeling of having the power to power the world.

Reflecting on Micro Challenge 03

For this challenge we were happy to focus on a bit more hardware and physical interaction design, as the rest of our project really relies on people interacting with software based tools it was a nice change of pace. It also really got us thinking about the MDEF fest (the final showcase at the end of the year where we exhibit the research we've been working on) and how we were going to get people to interact with our display stand and understand the research we'd been working on.

It was nice to see that a relatively simple idea of a large dial that invited you to turn on the power to the world became so effective at illustrating the point of energy overconsumption. The entire idea behind our research is not to make individuals feel as though it is their fault that we are consuming so much, rather it is to galvanise them to reflect and want to take action, no matter how small. Watching members of our class interact with the dial and rad the information displayed, it was great to see that this was actually giving them pause and take a moment to understand exactly what the numbers of consumption meant. To that end it was really good to have the various appliances plugged in to create a form of overwhelming sensory experience to try and illustrate that. We recieved some really good feedback from that first showing and we are looking forward to implementing that into the final display.

The order in which the appliances are turned on is going to be very important, we are going to have to restructure it in such a way that the most essential appliances turn on first and scale to up to more and more convenience or luxury items that aren't strictly necessary to survival but to a quality of life that we've become accustomed to. That's going to be really important because if we can illustrate that the items that we deem "essential" aren't necessarily so but we feel like we couldn't live without them, then perhaps that would be enough to motivate people to stop and reflect on just how much energy they use and is embodied in them, and if there was a better way to keep using those conveniences but with a lower energy consumption bill.

That would be great, and is going to be the next step that we are going to focus on for the exhibit design of The WattWise Project.

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