Week four Design workshop 'Interactive Model'

About the Design

This week our team focused on putting our skills and acquired knowledge from the previous workshops together in order to produce an interactive model. This model did not specifically have to be a master design piece, rather show and input leading to an output and the reason for these sequences.

After much collaboration on last weeks class and building further more on the idea of designing for a gambling environment our group came up with an idea to re design a roulette table. This table would directly interact with the user and give them feedback as to how well their individual bet was going.

Similar to the table demonstrated in the video above, our goal was to incorporate a noise experience, taping into the users emotions such as anxiousness and excitement. However this idea was quickly scrapped as we began to understand that the interactive aspect had nothing to do with the user actually causing the interaction. Therefore we went back to the drawing board and explored one of our initial ideas in terms of the user environment.

Public spaces

This particular environment provides opportunity to design an interactive product that can fill in time and add to the way everyday people interact within public spaces, in particularly pedestrian crossings.Our group decided we wanted to add something to the void of time people spend everyday waiting at traffic lights. The interaction between complete strangers doesn't happen often therefore we decided to introduce a game that you can compete against any random in the street. Simply the input is the individual person punching, kicking or using any kind of force to hit a surface which will the measure speed and strength. Simply the person that wins will be shown where the output of the green or red man is to cross the road. (For more information refer to final video at the bottom of this post).

Here are some images from the process that our group undertook in the building stage of our model.

 Reflecting on the Model

The model came together nicely and surprisingly withstood a lot of pressure for numerous amounts of people testing it within a public space. For now i will provide the link to my gorup presentation as I am having trouble uploading it.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bwskb6a0Nubda0pEcTBrY1lubms/edit