#i just had never done anything with arduino. or wires. or pretty much anything like this

[master-of-wii]

My son

[reflectivejournalbymyy]

Week 4 (21/9-25/9)

Module 2 kick-off

It’s time for the second module of this course. This time we will be working with expressivity with constraints, in this case one of the constraints are the limit of using only one LED-light which you can only change the intensity and duration off. We went through some examples of point lights, which we are suppose to use and discussed them. From what I understand we are going to explore what we can express through this one light. This could be an interesting assignment, and it will be nice not having everyone making lots of noice in the classroom. I’m excited to get back to the Arduino because I’ve seen such cool things done with it, I want to get creative with it. All of us tried an example together with the teacher just to get a quick recap on how you wire the board. I managed pretty quickly and then started to tinkle with the different parameters in code to see what happened.

Getting to know the new code

We got a new example to work with and now we are exploring and trying to mimic light patterns from one of the papers, Harrison et al(2012). I started with with just changing it very easily from on state to another, from waving to blinking and so on. It looks fairly easy to work with, we just need to get some idea of what we are supposed to do. I think that is the worst part about these assignments so far. We never really know what we are supposed to present or what the end “product” should be. It’s a constant feeling of being lost and not knowing if what you’re doing is in the right direction. The coaching sessions are so important and mostly helpful but sometimes I feel like they are just more confusing, negative and almost condescending. A couple of times we haven’t really been pushed in a direction or gotten comments of where or what we should think of next. This has just happened one or two times times though, most of the time you sit on pins and needles just to grab the teacher as soon as they get inside the classroom to get some sense of direction.

The first a little more complicated light pattern I managed to make was the EKG pattern. I had some trouble because I needed two different setting on the increase state and didn’t know how to manage this. I tried the logic that if the previous state was this, do this, or if the previous state was that, do that. I ended up making two new states for this because the increase with different conditions didn’t work. After making the statements the pattern was quite easy to put together to its finished look. 

Notification from loved ones

Today we talked about more of an idea for the assignment. We thought about notifications from loved ones. Since a phone most of the time only have one little light to show different kinds of notifications we thought of that as an inspirational source. How the notification could act and behave based on who is sending it to you and how you handle it upon receiving it. We thought about three different stages the light could go trough when you’d receive something on your phone.

1. It’s excited to reach you at first. It’d light up, start blinking or flickering a little to then go off again, stay off for a quick second and the go on again. This would run for a while. If you wait for a longer time before opening the notification it goes on to the next stage.

2. The  anxious state. The light gets worried, as a loved one would be if they didn’t hear back from you. If you continue to leave it for an even longer time it goes to the third and last stage.

3. The neglected state. It feels lonely, like you don’t care about it. It’s attention isn’t worth your time.

This idea was later scrapped and I will come to that but reading back on these stages it makes absolutely no sense for me to have the neglected state last. The anxious should come last. You wouldn’t feel anxious to then be feeling neglected, it would probably come to you the other way around. You send an excited notification to a loved one, they don’t answer. You feel annoyed and neglected. If still not receiving a response you would maybe start to worry and get that anxious feeling we were after.

Coaching

As always when getting coaching from the teachers they want more nuance. We talked about making it more continued. Not making it just exited or anxious, but having states that are in-between. It doesn’t have to be either this or that, it can be both. We also got the comment that this is pretty much just switching between states, but isn’t anything just going to be switching between different states? Could we make it start two cases at the same time? I think that would only go for the highest value of brightness all the time so it would be hard to see that it was two different states happening at once. 

Feeling the emotions

We noticed that many people was working with exploring emotions and some of the groups had gotten good feedback for doing this, that it was in the right direction and so on. We took a step back and looked at what we had thus far. We had my EKG pattern and my partners bright flash pattern, two completely different patterns. We sat down and took out time watching each patterns and see what it made us feel and think of. 

EKG:

- It’s slow, almost making me wait for the next change to happen.

- Calming

- Twinkeling

- It sort of has the same as a classic film structure

- “Hope” -classmate.

BRIGHT FLASH:

- Could be a counter.

- Looks like breathing, I started matching my breathing with it.

- Attention seeking

- Unsteadiness because of the flickering at the top. 

We really liked the fact that one classmate that we asked thought of hope as she saw the EKG and could relate to it, it was an interesting feeling and we wanted to keep working with it.

So what  can we do with the feeling of hope? We started asking ourselves questions. Why do we feel hope? What about it sparks an emotion of hope? What other patterns spark hope? What do they have in common? Some of these were not answered but the more we talked about it I think it sparks hope within me when the brightness goes from complete darkness and then increases, which it does in the EKG. Does the way of increase make a different? That is our next step. Making different kinds of increases to see if they make us feel different. We really want to make an exponential curve since the ones we have now are all linear. There are different kinds of hope, will this make us feel a different one? Can we play with how many set back a person can take before they lose hope?

Different increases or patterns we could try:

We managed, with some help, to make an exponential increase but I didn’t really give us the feeling we were aiming for. Partly because everything happened so fast. Since it is an exponential it increases very quickly, and we didn’t think of that. We managed to slow it down a little by putting a time frame on it but it still felt a little off to us. The light wasn’t expressing hope, I didn’t connect to it at all actually