Next week we have a meeting with our class again. Then we have to present a framework of our mock presentation and this is meant as a try-out for the official presentation. That means we are somewhere in the middle of our project. According to my planning I’m still a little bit behind schedule; I had to make some low-fidelity prototyping this week. It’s about finding a balance between building a solid foundation, making the right decisions and working as fast as possible. As always, time is not on my side.
I’ve been busy with putting every bit of information I got together. Below you can see the end of my brainstorm session. I’ve put some extra pictures and source material on the wall in our office room for inspiration too.
end of brainstorm
I got some help from Aduen with brainstorming. it was very helpful to get some extra ideas and inspiration.
In retrospect, my starting point of my project was to redesign the control over the television, and adapt it optimally to the human body, human behavior and the television environment. It practically boils down to redesigning the remote in a critical way. I had different ideas to achieve this. I thought about gestures only, redesigning the interface on the remote itself or using a complete new object (not like the candybar design that all remotes have).
My plan for next week will be low fidelty prototyping. Hereby I want take it to the basics of embodied interaction. I want to build a (fake) set up of a television environment and figure out how the average user expects how to control the television and its devices, without the use of any buttons (!). With this I want to find out what mental models people have of a ‘buttonless’ remote.
- How will people think it will control the television set this way, only through gestures?
- How do you select different devices?
- What kind of patterns will emerge from different target groups?
- What feedback is expected in the controller itself?
- I want to be the remote as less intrusive as possible (my research concluded that less attention to control, the better it is);
- I want to test different shapes. a candybar? a cube? a ball? a stick? a pillow?
I have some basic ideas I want to test through observation. I want to put up a camera to document the testing. In the weekend I will develop a plan how to do this observation, so I can start with it as early as possible.
