By the way, if you are a salsa lover, you definetly should visit Riga. And check out both Riga salsa festival and Latvia salsa festival which will take a part there in summer.

So, about the last project. It began on December before going home where we had to create an interactive lamp. This was heavy but interesting project just for a week.

Planning an interactive lamp

Before sketching and presenting our ideas of the lamp, we concentrated on  4 things:

Sketch interactive lamp

• light – you can do amazing things with this beautiful phenomenon of the world,
• interaction – it needed to be simple, but innovative, and fitting in overall theme of the lamp,
• materials – should be high quality, also fitting with a theme of the lamp,
• symbolism – represent the light, communicate theme.

Then we continued with sketching our (crazy) ideas and presenting 3 selected to our peers. As I haven’t done a sketching much before, I was surprised how creativity starts to flow after diving into sketching. I ensured again that our minds (individually and collectively) are such a great source of ideas if opened by right techniques.

So basically my idea was to create a lamp where you put a finger inside and blinks accordingly to your heartbeats.

Planning a form & interaction

Ideas on a form of interactive lamp

After talking with people (our supervisor and course mates) we decided that this idea would be interesting to make. As this was a first I am creating any electronics (I have been only breaking it when I was a child), I also contacted our electronics teacher as early as possible. After his accept of possibility to create electronics for this in a week, I continued further.

Now as idea was clear it needed to decide on form which would support a topic of heartbeats/life. There were a couple of candidates – an egg, a stream, century plant, an oak leaf and a circle. I selected an egg, as I thought it would be more interesting that something would happen inside. Besides, it supports an idea of life pretty well (a birth).

Next part was to plan how somebody will interact with this lamp. It was clear from beginning that a finger will be put in. But what should happen? Will the color of light change? So in my case I chose the easiest way – just to blink a light according to heartbeats.

Creating a form & assembling electronics

Form of an interactive lamp

When the idea of what should be created was clear, I decided to start making a form. I thought it would be more appropirate to make the container (egg) from a foam. So I cut two halfs of an egg with an empty middle (for electronics and LEDs).

It was quite a challenge to cut a precise egg form in 3D environment, on a paper it looks easy, but not in real world … Significant part of cutting was based on intuition.

A grey tube on the top of egg is meant to be a place where a finger should be put in. Basically a technique was to let the light (LED) shine through a finger while on the other end receiving changes of the light (transparency of finger) by a light depended resistor.

A challenge here was to to keep as short distance between light emittor and receiver as possible. An additional thing was that if distance would be wrong, there wouldn’t be time for me to change this (so probably I needed more planning there).

The intellectual part of electronics was planned to make using an Arduino prototyping platform. Special thanks for Meng Li who has made her (similar) project accessible to the public.

After the form of a foam was ready, I needed to make the pieces of glass for holes (to see the light inside), put LEDs inside and a photoresistor. Then I glued both parts together and put another clay layer outside, so it would be an egg solid. Then I needed just to paint it black and add the electronic circuit (thanks to our electronics teacher). The electronic circuit was working, but I was concerned if the distance between light emitter and receiver will be enough. Unfortunately it was not, so I was sad a little bit and ashamed because I had also to present it at exhibition.

Are you alive?

However, the best thing we can do is to try better next time and not become too upset, because that becomes a paralysis – a waste of our hours of life that we can’t get back

Presenting at exhibition

At the end we had to present our work at exhibition, where students from electronics and interaction design also took a part. I was impressed what is possible to make by electronics and I never thought that I will do something like that will electronics. That was inspiring.

You can check some of other reeeeally interesting lamps and other interactive developments in my Flickr account.

Were were four people in team, and I was the only one European (we actually did this project in Umeo university as the guests). I worked with three talanted girls from Canada, Brazil and China.

So here is the basic indegrents that experienced during our project.

1. Choosing a dilemma as an inspiration,
2. Setting a team,
3. Brainstorming on the idea of the game,
4. Developing a concept
5. Testing on users
6. Reiterating to 4th point and making improvements
7. Finishing product by making user instructions

1. Choosing a dilemma as an inspiration

We made interviews with local companies, searching for dilemmas they have to deal with in everyday life. In our case we chose the multitasking dilemma, where employees have to deal with tasks they were not hired for. How to deal with own tasks while in the same time helping a team?

A game should be interesting enough to engage players for a longer time, it should provoke people for discussions as well.

2. Setting a team

We set a team based on the similarity of our dilemma (we had three seperate dilemmas for all members). However, this reason for setting up a team is not enough. As it turned out (not only in this project), it is much easier to work if all team members know each other’s background, skills and wishes. Based on that it is possible to divide the roles and not overlay work of other members thus saving the time.

Forgetting the roles is useful in brainstorm session, defining strategy of the project but it is not effecient way of actually developing something.

And it is always much better to see not only team’s success but also your own (speaking about roles).

For us, it helped a lot, that we all were willing to work and interested to make that game as interesting as possible.

3. Brainstorming on the idea of the game

We started working by choosing a (multitasking) dilemma and brainstorming on that together. We came up with different concepts and discussed if it would be engaging, intellectual enough and relevant to our dilemma. Of course, we also needed to keep in mind that we had only two weeks for making that game with requests of making two prototypes from user testing sessions.

We managed to get along only with writings / drawings on the paper and talking. But in brainstorming a post-it sheets and even an acting could be efficient as well.

4. Developing a concept

In the same day when brainstorming was held, we made a quick-and-dirty prototype to test on our selves if ideas would be viable.

5. Testing on users

We had two user testing sessions where we got a lot of feedback and new ideas on how to improve our game’s concept. It is surprising how many variations users discover on how to use the game.

So basically we were not alone the the team. Users made a great part of source of inspiration. After each of two sessions we had a large amount of improvements to concept. Watching and listening user inspired us for new ideas and provided as additional constraints to consider, for instance, the physical limitations of the body. There were cases when short persons played together with long persons, and it made the playing unequal (people with long hands had better chances to win).

6. Reiterating to 4th point and making improvements

After each user session we had full notebooks of ideas and reflections, so it was necessary to return back to concept making. In that point we also decided how to make the game, user instructions and box technologically. We made a sketches in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign.

7. Finishing product

Almost all parts were made by wood. It was cut precisely with a laser cutter which was fed up with Corel Draw sketches.

Game pack was actually not a box, but a bag, which we made with a sewing machine.

If you want to see more of the two week’s work, check out my personal Flickr Set or our course account.