Week 5 Class & Workshop

In this class, Harshad, Ryan and I held the first student classroom and classroom activities. There will be approx. In the next few weeks, there are seven venues. The theme of this week is "Contemporary Technology", which mainly discusses whether we should continue to use modern technology or should use it with restraint. I will give the speech first. I have mainly studied the development of contemporary science and technology, and there have been significant changes. Technology has provided us with great convenience. In the second part, Harshad introduced us to mobile phones, the changes in mobile phones over time, and how we use them today. He showed us a video from Casey Neistat, which talked about social media addiction. Since then, this part of the speech made me consider my social media usage habits. The third part, Ryan talked about the development of social media and how we use it. He spoke about the reasons why apps like Facebook and Instagram are exploding in our society, and why we are so dependent on them. This involves people such as code and algorithms, such as the codes and algorithms used by Mark Zuckerburg, the owner of the two companies, in the creation and continuous development.

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After that, we prepared class activities for classmates, and we prepared 5 personas.

Persona 1 - Zazzles

Team Members - Neasa Carroll, Niamh Barton, Chidi Usanga, Kruthi Kiran

The group’s aim was to design a device to help a cat tell the story of his life. The cat wanted to tell the story of how we were abused as a kitten and how rough life on the streets was. He wants to do that via the medium of film and the limitation to the group was to make it without touch screens since Zazzle had paws. The group came up with a very innovative idea of designing a vest that would attach the popular action cameras “GoPro” on cats front and back. The group went one step ahead and proposed that the vest was made out of a protective anti-scratch material which would prevent other cats from bothering Zazzle. There was also a sensor included in the vest which would open the door as he approached the door as if he was trying to escape from a fight

Persona 2 - Asuka

Team Members - Michella Tedjo, Sreejith Prabhakaran, Josephine Lim, Bernard O’Connel

The task of this group is to solve the problem of tracking mania for an office worker living alone in Japan. What this group needs to pay attention to is that the product of this design must be a wearable device. The group quickly brainstormed and cosplayed girls' wearables. After some discussions, the design that their group finally gave was an earring with interactive functions. It has a touchable sensor. When the user starts the sensor, the product itself will alarm and draw the attention of the surrounding people. If the user performs a long-press operation, the product will send the distress information directly to the police. The selected prototype of this product is very unique. It uses earrings, which is small and light and suitable for girls. Functionally, I think it can be improved. How the product attracts the attention of people around you, will this approach indirectly reach users?

Persona 3 - Xiaomeng & Xiaoxi

Team Members - Prof. Gabriela Avram, Tim Nakayama The task of this group is to solve the problem of allocating household chores for a couple who has been working for a while. This group needs to be aware that they do not have a lot of funds, but they have high requirements for the product. After a series of discussions and design activities, the directions given by the members of the group helped the couple to allocate housework and reach consensus. To satisfy their taste for design, the designers decided to use two different colours of leather to make the discs and make different housework into boards. The couple needs to distribute weekly to reach a fair distribution. Members also believe that the actual board will achieve better results than the electronic board. I like the idea of this product very much because he meets the conditions given in the story, this is a couple with poor financial status, so for them, expensive electronic equipment is the very burdensome weight. What's more, this face-to-face communication can also increase the chance for two people to communicate. But it would be better if we could have more interesting places in terms of interactivity.

Persona 4 - Kulmeet Singh & Indrajeet Singh

Team Members - Ruta Gulbe, Mary O’Dea, Liam Lennon The main challenges with this task were to design a device to allow Kulmeet to know if his son was stealing some gold from the store for his girlfriend. A small problem within this challenge was for the Jeweler not to offend or accuse his son. The team did an excellent job tackling this issue. When it was the group’s turn to present they shared their product which was an interactive weighing scale. The idea to make a better business move & get good prices for the latest gold exchange rates and make sure his son wouldn’t steal anything. Each group member explained different elements of the design. Mary explained the design elements as Liam held the product. The product was designed with a state of the art weighing scale which showed all of the stock prices. As well as this there was a camera added, to ensure the workspace was safe & not exposed to possible robbery.

Persona 5 - Pirate James Cook

Team Members - Brian MacAree, Biyi Liang, Yan Liu

The main challenges were to facilitate James’s hand being a hook & making a device to unite his beloved parrot whilst James is at his new accounting job in San Fran. The group made a great effort together to inform themselves of the challenges that came with the task. They had a few questions, one being as to why it was mentioned that he was saving money to buy a new boat? The reasoning behind this was whilst the group was designing the product or service they would have to keep his tight budget in mind. We were very pleased when the group presented their idea. They made a quite intuitive product for James the pirate, a keyboard using his foot and a device in the shape of a boat steering wheel to allow him to punch in his numbers for his day to day accounting tasks. As well as this there was a screen & camera so he could keep in touch with his parrot, Ben. We thoroughly enjoyed their creativity to also present what would happen in the future/allow him to make money to buy his boat. That being, a viral and successful Youtube channel of both James & Ben.