Week 4

Posters
That was one hack of an assignment. It was a rather great experiance working with 2 people I've yet to work with for this assignment, and furthermore a lot more have been learnt in thsi process. It was rather interesting to see how our sterngths compliment each other and even though there was some last minute stuff, but yah... it turned out all well. Great job team.
The only think that made us all pissed off was in fact the printer... what the hell was wrong with the colour printer? I can't believe it, I was trying to print the posters are 12midnight monday after the final touches were done and I just ccan't seem to be able to relise for printing... something has to be looked into this...I'm sure ITS can do a lot better.
All is not lost though, during this time of being unable to print anything or waiting, I found 2 very rough and unrefined pencil sketches of our designs, which I've just sketched randomly while travelling on the train. So I thought why not refind them and used them for the presentation as well...(guess not all rough sketches should not be treated as juke after all). I managed to refine both sketches and while doing it I tried to show how much the development process should be, showing specific part of the design, putting ideas into, trying to explain as much of the idea we were thinking of during meets in pictures. Turned out great indeed.

Projects selected
There were a lot of projects to be selected from in fact 22, which I'm surprised to see, and I couldn't quit make up my mind about it, some seem too good to be true some seemed a lot eaiers than others, and some will...still seems impossible to do.
After visiting the room on 3 different days and changing my ideas everytime I go in there, I've fianlly decided on 17(cambot), 6(hitme) and 12(Exhibit room =) ). I intially thought of doing the piano stairs and beat machine, but there seem to be at least 10 students who want to do those projects, and they seem rather easy, build a sensor pad, hack apart a keyboard, link it up to the PC/Mac and done.
Seriously I think students should not be finding the easy way out this time, cause in the industry we don't always get to choose our projects and sometimes we get projects that make us feel like quiting our jobs(speaking from experiance). If we always choose the assignments we know, what is there in that? Furthermore this is studio...its about the whole process, not just the end product. Its about development, its about growth, its about research(learnt this the hard way during studio 5), its about the element that makes the design work.
Thus my decision to choose something which I do not know much of, but fits into my strengths(technical stuff and coding)this leaves me some room for research and also more to discover during development.

Hmm, not how to I make something follow me around, and take picutre.....looks like I'll be asking my tutors a lot of questions..... ; )

Week 3

Assessment
I thought we were going to get totally kicked during the group assessment, as we had some repeating ideas from last year and after I saw how many duplicate idea there were.
The session went better than expected, we even managed to come up wth new ideas for the project. It looks like we are heading in the right direction this time, the vegie garden, the sensor toilets and our new idea of the exibit room(I'll give more details at the bottom).
In fact Ann even help us to come up with several thing we could add to the vegie garden and built upon the idea of the exibit room.

Meetings
Now for our group meetings, with a new idea in hand seriously we can't wait to start working on(that is until how it comes back and bites us). So how did we actually come up with this new idea.
Well, Megan was thinking about this place called INFINITY, where they have room, that are like in different colours, that changes, reflective floor panels, luminious stars on the celling, and even rooms that emulate space walking(i.e. a water bed that covers the entire room) and plus the face that here in Ipswich we do not have an exibition room, so we've decided to have a room and is well, and exibition room but also a customisable one.
Ok, this is how it works, the controls in the room are all linked up to a computer and with this you will be able to change the lighting, the colour of the room, and the music, the ambient, thus, its not only and exibition room, but it'll be a place which is able to affect the mood of people, imagine a place a room, when people enters it changes their mood(hopefully it won't become a brain washing facility).
Plus to make it an exibition room, the floor panels can be removed or changed(just like the one in QUT) and we're thinking of having empty spaces in the walls, to that student can put their projects in it. For example the zombie attack game, we could have it in the wall and the fabric just covers the enterance.

For the vegie garden, we;ve decided to change it to something like a research project, it mobile, and maybe even 2 or 3 could be implemented, the same vegie, but different music to see what type of music grows. Also to place them at different parts of the Uni, just to see how well thy grow with the amount of human interaction it get. As there are more people at the library area than building, we could see like how plants grow in those different areas.
The vegie will of course be in huge containers, with a pipe leading to it for a watering system, and and selection of music which students can choose to play.

We general felt that the sensor toilets was making use of existing technology, however it the one integrated system that has not been done yet.
Thus instead of hand sensored flush or music, we decided to have pressure sensors instead, so you won't even need to wave you hand, just walk in and walk out, the doors will open when you step outside of the cubical, it will lock once you're inside(can only be unlocked from the inside), when you're seated, the music will start to play and and when you're done, just stand up and walk out, and it will detect your movements and flush and unlock the door. How cool is that!!!!

For the remainder of the week and next, we'll be getting pictures of the places we think of implementing our ideas, sketches of our ideas and we may try to do like a "prototype" or 2 maybe using a box to show how the room works, typing out the detail project descriptions and fianlly creating the posters for our 3 ideas.

Week 2

Outing at QUT

I persoanlly feel that this trip does give me a better prospective on what we are to come up with for the project.
And also on simple definations like interactivity, what is interactivity, what does it consist of, the different factor of it, the different levels of it and in who's prospective we have to think in if we were to desgin something. It is interesting to see that simple things are actually consist of a lot of aspects.

After looking at the exibits, I personally like the "Shooting Gallery"(Sorry, Ann), not too sure why but I seem to prefer the non-IT ones, somehow or rather, they seem to be more simple, like straight to the point or rather "idiot proof" its just like when you pick up a gun and have targets in front of you the natural human action would be to shoot, thats like a natural re-action without even much thinking. Like the level of interactivity comes from the sub-conciousness.

For example in our group project, the Veggie/Herb Garden, instead of just saying "hello", once it catches the person attention, it could even say something like "I'm down here", and that will trigger the person to actually look down into to veggie garden(hopefully without freaking them out).
I guess some of the stuff from the "ReActive" exibition could be "recycled" into out projects.

Will try to make a few more improvements to the design ideas.

Week 1

Was going through abrain storming session with Tash and Megan, we spotted a few things that well, pretty much could be implemented in UQ to make the lives of stduent a lot better.

We we mainly targeting non-IT background projects, but me being me having a strong IT background, just couldn't help it so, here are as follows the projects which we thought of.

1. Virtual Directory
We were thinking of like how 1st year students see their timetable with the location on it, and then they have their location but they have no idea how the rooms look like or roughly which part in the building it is located in. A virtual directory will be like a directory which actually show all there details, it will start off with the map of the uni, than if lets say a student wants to find out where room 12-309B, they'll click on building 12, which the directory will zoom in on building 12, than level 3, and than it will pan into a camera view of the corridor on level 3 highligting all the room on that level. So basically this directory will not only show the student how it looks like, but how to get there as well.

2. Vegetable/Herb Garden
This is really one of the strangest/most interesting things we've thought of. However ever we're still thinking on where this veggie graden should go. I was thinking of building on the fact that the stream in the library is like a "landmark" we could add this veggie garden to the stream. Now what makes it interactive, well, we're thinking of add some motion sensor to it, that when it detects people walking around, it would actually play some music, or maybe say "hello" to them or something, but talking plants does sound freaky. Another feature we were thinking about was making it an aeroponic(plants are hung with roots exposed and a mist spray is used to feed them water) as well. This feature will tie in with a weather detection function, that if it detects rain outside, the mist spray will start to spray at the plants, and if there is no rain, than well, it just pretty much leaves it alone.

3. Interactive Toilet
This is actually to counter that feeling that the people in the toilet can actually hear you, when you're like flushing, and doing other things or a secinario when your at the gym taking a shower your face is covered with soap and you can't seem to see where to turn on the shower.
For the flushing problem we were thinking have having someting like a touch pad that plays music to that it covers up the sound of the water, and for things like the shower, instead of turning or pushing, maybe just by waving the hand at the shower head the water will just come out, this can also be used for taps and other thing, furthermore it does save a certain amount of water, it will only be on when it detects someone waving at it.

4. Sensor Carparks
Noticing a large number of students do drive to school, and sometimes it does get very difficult to find an empty parking lot. Ok what does it mean by sensor carparks? There will be a small sensor at the back of everyparking lot, and a digital display board outside the carpark. So when ever a car parks in that lot, the sensor will know that the lot is taken up and will display on the board the number of empty lots remainding. This can even be further implemented to the point where each parking lot is given a number and the sign will display not just the number of empty lots, but also where these lots are. This will prevent the amount of time lost just to search for a parking lot.

5. Travelator From Building 1 to 12
First of all why this idea, well, there is no sheltered pathway from building 1 all the way to building 12. And adding a travelator, like the ones in the airport, will not only save the trouble of walking, but, it will be exceptionally useful for students carrying large objects from one building to another, large objects like, last year's Studio 4 assignments, considering that most student's work are displayed at the library. Still working with sensors, we were thinking of making the shelter being able to detect rain, so if there is no rain, it remainds opened, if there is rain, it will automatically close up, and also to save some electricity, travelator will only move if there is someone standing on it, so at night when there is almost nobody at Uni, the travelator will just stop by itself. There is another feature that we were thinking of, if a student happens to come in the opposite direction, the travelator will actually start beeping as a wanring signal, but well, constraining the travelator to move only in one direction can sound a bit lame at times.

So far there are the ideas we've came up with and we'll trying add more to them.