Week 3 - Interaction Design & Tangible Interaction Workshop

Today the term Interaction Design was defined further for us as a way of looking at how we can:

• shape everyday life through digital artefacts
• define the behavious associated with a product and user
• focus on the user through the service
• stimulate meaningful relationships with the product or system.

It will be interesting to see how this is achieved through various forms of tangible interactions.

Core to all of this is:

• Defining the product behaviours, and
• defining the users information needs
• How can the various forms of information be brought to the user?

To do this the aim is to use the following model:

The tangible interaction must satisfy both the control input or information needs and the output or sense needs.

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Product Hack Workshop

The workshop following helped us start to understand what it means to have a tangible interaction with an object and how that assists the user to communicate non-verbally. We explored the possibilities that our materials had to offer. Here is a selection of the materials and items that we had brought along.

 RC Boat, Syringe, Tubing, Electric toothpick, Balsa, Acrylic strips, Blue Foam Blocks, Swivel Platform, RC Helicopter, nuts bolts screws, Phone Holder

First item to be dismantled was the RC helicopter remote.

 

The remote came apart quite easily and it was suprising to see how little was in there. The parts that interested me were the joysticks so after removing the circuit board I inspected the joystick mechanism.

 

The joystick functioned very differently to what I had imagined. The photos on the left show the gold coloured connections that slide in the oposite direction to the joystick. These connected to the circuit board and depending on the position would tell the helicopter to do different things.

This slide mechanism was far more complicated than I thought it would be...would it be the cheapest?

 

The helicopter itself appeared to have some very usable parts such as a spindle and tail rotor that could initiate rotational movement. Unfortunately we never got round to using them. I'll be keeping these just in case.

Our next victim was the RC Boat (demolished by John).

There were some interesting mechanisms that used magnets to control the rudder via the servo. All very useful for future ideas for control mechanisms to enable different tangible interactions.

On further deconstruction we found that the motor had seized and the universal joint between the motor and the prop shaft had disappeared...what to do???

Well another group had brought in their electric hair trimmer whose batteries had died so after replacing the batteries and fabricating a univeral joint from balsa we had a functioning propellor again. What if the boat spun around the propellor???... just a thought.

To further improve on this advancement we looked at what we could add...obviously a bigger propellor. So was born the amphibious wind powered boat.

After class my thoughts turned to how we could develop these mechanisms into some form of tangible interaction?

Vertical movement via rotation?
Using a mechanism that resembles a helicopter tail rotor on a threaded rod. The object could travel up the rod signifying an online contact.

Spinning that causes imbalance?
If the boat were to rotate around the prop shaft it would most likely knock itself over. Could this be used to signify something? A social interaction?

Bobbing mechanism that Represents thinking/working?

A ball bobbing up and down on a fan could signify that someone is thinking/is in limbo?

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My thoughts so far:

I'm starting to get some interesting ways of providing a tangible interaction through a digitally controlled artefact. I'm very interested in trying to find a way of providing a very simple input and output however I have not yet decided or discovered what that could be. Stay tuned...