Micro challenge 01

Working with Oliver to connect to our houses energy and portraying the data.

This week was an intense week focussed on how Oliver and I could use current products to create our own interface that shows data in a more informative way as well as taking the first steps to creating a way one could connect to their house through a chat. 

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Finding our interests.

With Oliver and I working on our thesis together the focus area for this project was already quite defined beforehand. We knew we wanted to explore our relation to energy and also potentially creating a new way to measure energy. We started this week by quickly going through our interests, framing the problem, sketching potential solutions and making a plan for the week.

Working throughout the weak

It was an extremely busy and high-pressure week and while we are both product designers by nature, this week we spent most of our time acting as software engineers. We really learned by doing and tried out various codes and existing structures to streamline our experience. I feel that the video below shows the reality of our week, trying failing succeeding and troubleshooting constantly. 

Final Results

At the end of the week we had managed to not only grab and use the data from the tapo plug, but also make a start on how we could create a chatbot in the future. This question of what would it be like to talk to your house is a concept I am quite interested in exploring further. It also made me wonder in which ways can data be used and portrayed in tangible means. Now we had focussed on an artistic portrayal but what are things other people might understand better?

Reflecting on Micro challenge 01

Overall the past week has allowed for a lot of growth in the way of design and research for our thesis. I feel that we were able to learn the limitations of sticking to existing systems and how one could quite easily "hack" current systems to function in a new and innovative way. 

The main struggle I feel was the way to get the different components to flow with each other and getting the data shown in a new way. Looking at what we accomplished in such a short time I realize that we did what we set out to, but through the experience we gained a lot of new questions as well. For now I think we have a clear idea of what we want to do in the next challenge and coming weeks. We need to better understand how our AI chatbot could function and which inputs it could take and what possibilities there are for an output. 

Another key component is that we wondering is there a way of making an easy system that can measure electricity over a whole house without needing a plug in all outlets? Can we potentially make a design that learns through asking and not by needing one to spend a day inputting all the values? 

All in all, a very interesting week that had led me to have many new questions for in the future. I am excited to see how the courses in the coming week, specifically the one focussed on extended intelligence can help improve my understanding of energy and the system we hope to build. 

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