#emergentpractices

[createataco]

Here is our simulation as we presented it on presentation day. I did think of adding sounds, but it was overlooked due to more important things in combination with time constraints

[av-wyngaard-creativetech]

Emergent Practices

So looking at girls and coding I have come to a point where I feel I understand more than ever now the reasons behind the lack of woman in tech when they grow up. Social Image or how girls and woman may be perceiving the industry. Many of the articles I read talked about the fact that woman aren’t interested as it is a male dominated field. But what I have found is that it’s not only the facts but many of them from young girls see on tv the industry filled with men and then assume that this is only a career for them.  

Not only that but through looking at the research I found a lot of the work to do with children were guessing. The reason for saying this is because I went to a school and sat down with some of the girls, many of them had no idea what coding was. But in the articles they talk about it as if the kids understand everything. I’ve taken from this that you shouldn’t guess what people may be thinking as your perception may not be correct, if you what to truly know what people think go and ask them as you may find yourself getting a completely different outcome.

[aliucreativetech]

Emergent Practices - Presentation

The presentation was something of a mixed bag due to the nature of how our group worked on separate projects. As for my project I received a lot of user feedback based on our concept that I should have sought after earlier. Something important that I’ve learned is the importance of user feedback. What I have in my head may not translate to people the way I expect. User feedback is something I should have done earlier in my project.

A way to have gone about this without developing an app would have been to survey user interest in the idea, as well as finding out awareness surrounding idle games and how it appeals to people. From the other presentations it was clear that the better ones went through a lot more of an iterative process involving user feedback. For most of my projects throughout BCT, user feedback was never a high priority so I feel I’ve never really considered it as much as I should have.

It was good to hear that a lot of people had some interest in my concept and that my thoughts of what might interest people wasn’t completely off the mark. However, I could have had a much more refined concept and with more user wanted features if I had surveyed. This is something I will definitely be keeping in mind in all my future projects out in the real world.

Not bad, though!

[annmariegcreates]

Wrapping up Emerging Practices for this semester

This class was more enjoyable than anticipated this semester. I’m not one that wishes to focus my own projects with the purpose of social good, however the way in which this was executed, I actually didn’t mind. The class set up was different from the norm, with a new lecturer, where I found everyones opinion was heard and discussed and really mattered. We weren’t lectured at and through blogs we were able to reflect on tasks and learnings from each week. When I came back to my desk, my studio group member even commented that she wished other classes were setup similar to EP. 

I have learnt new skills in approaching problems, whether they be for social good or not, and can be applied to the work force when I leave the university environment. Through productive feedback, regardless the mark, I was able to push and challenge my own thoughts and writing definitely for the better. My project I knew could have been better with a cleaner execution but based on time constraints and going solo I couldn’t push it further to where I would have liked it. I would have involved the target market much more and if it were a studio paper, I would have placed even more effort upon it. I had never though fully made a website mockup so this was the key learnings from this paper for my own future career and for moving into the web media production class next semester. 

[kmandasheehancreativetech]

Process we went through dev Power Pod

(Posted here because it was just documentation of what we did, won’t make it into the essay) PROCESS Our group consisting of Dale, Shaun and I naturally came together as we had previously worked on a pilot project last year together. We share similar interests such as playing video games and we get along fairly well so these factors contributed to our group formation. We shared the work load fairly evenly and were always on the same page when discussing and building upon each other’s ideas. Around the time when we were doing the Rich picture exercise for class, we all talked about being tired. This sparked the idea to work our project around solving the problem of tiredness. We did some shared brainstorming over the next week through a google document and on paper and came up with some wacky and non-feasible ideas but weren’t drawn to any one idea in particular. We shared our thoughts with Ricardo and he gave us a lot of insight and context around our issue that we had never thought of before. He spoke to us about Airline companies and a market of jetlagged people, and perhaps looking into a sleeping service for luxury hotels. We also considered creating a solution for people who work night-shifts and need a place to sleep during the daytime. After spending a while researching into already existing solutions for tiredness we rested on two concepts: the NapSack (a backpack you can also use to nap on) and the Power Pod (a place to nap at university). For me, these ideas came during the researching period and were inspired by the Nutshell, the Ostrich Pillow (both portable sleeping solutions for one person) and by the commercial sleeping pods made by companies such as Podtime and Metronaps. The idea to use university students as a target audience seemed appropriate as this problem heavily affected us and our peers. Especially as the semester was coming to a close we could feel and see how tired everyone was at university. It was visually apparent through the empty coffee cups and energy drink cans littering studio, and by sleeping students crashed out at their desks and on couches. During researching I stumbled upon an article published on the Time magazine’s website. It states that the University of Michigan installed Napping rooms as “Poor sleep was found to be as powerful as binge drinking, and more powerful than marijuana, in predicting who would have academic problems.“ (Waxman, 2014). As a group we knew that we ourselves were tired, but we wanted feedback from our peers and target audience to help shape our project by helping us decide which concept to develop further. As a result, we created a strawpoll with both ideas and put the vote up to the public. The majority of votes were for the sleeping pod, and this pushed us to develop this idea further. Looking back, this was probably not the best way to go about choosing which concept to develop. People were not properly informed about what each of the ideas were and given more information may have voted for the other option. I feel like we chose to develop the sleeping pod because we were running out of time and needed to quickly choose a path to go down, and felt pressured by the votes to go with what the people wanted. If we had more time we could have asked people why they voted for one over the other, trying to find the pros and cons of each idea and then developing based on that feedback. Once we had decided to work on the sleeping pod concept we all brought some of our own concepts together and decided to develop my cocoon like sleeping pod idea and integrated features from their concepts. We knew that visualisation of our concept was key for conveying our idea to others. For our prototype I 3D modelled the basic shape of the pod and the feature development and photoshopping of details were done by Dale and Shaun. However we were not finished there. Our main way of gaining valuable insight and learning from doing our project was to be found in gaining feedback from our target audience about our product. Together we created a questionnaire on google forms with various questions about people being tired at university, reasons why, what they thought of our pod design, concerns and improvements etc. We found our most valuable advice from the paragraph text answers. We learned their major concerns were hygiene, security and privacy. We turned this constructive feedback into feasible design changes.

[kmandasheehancreativetech]

Video for presentation

[av-wyngaard-creativetech]

This is my submission for my projects girls and coding. I decided that in terms of prototype I would not have enough time to go and build or develop wearable tech to the standard I would like. So I decided to do a video submission on the meet up I had with the girls a Whangaparaoa Primary. 

What I found was very interesting, from the research I looked at there was a quote saying that when developing coding tools for girls don’t simplify it or make it look pretty just as a reason for them being girls.

When I went and talked to the girls at the school it was fascinating as many of them didn’t really have an understanding of what coding was or how it was used. Which showed me already the research assumed they had knowledge of something not all of them may have. 

I talked to them about some of the reasons were that they may not take a computer class further on in school and the general result was, that they found it was very nerdy and that based on what they have seen and heard it was more a man’s world.

To me image means a lot when it comes to the Tech world and it truly is dominated with men. Seeing the girls didn’t really understand coding or the principle that most thing in this modern era have coding involved what I did was show them some examples. 

I showed them a project I did last year called Toby and interactive installation, and also brought some sound/ dance based ones along for them to play with.

What I found was many of them became truly fascinated with the creations and became very involved. I then went and asked the girls after the play around, what their thoughts are now after they have done this. They al came back saying they had no idea it was so colourful and could be so fun.

After all this I left the teacher with a website which would keep the girls involved with fun coding projects (Made with Code by Google).

To me the results were very interesting and I found that that main quote was incorrect, for girls of this age (8-11) looks play a big part in the development. They want something colourful, bright and fun, perhaps in the future if we can show how creative coding could be and show the girls some interesting projects they can do themselves, then maybe later on in life they may take the Tech world further.

To me the video is just a little tidbit to show what I found at the school, but the most important thing was understanding the girls thinking, and my research. I chose to do an animated style video as it can be fun and colourful and I felt like that would accompany the theme of girls in coding very well.  

[kmandasheehancreativetech]

Video content draft

[Title picture] [Picture of prototype] The Power Pod is designed for students to have quick naps to recharge their bodies to help with University studies. The Pod has many features including a sleep cycle monitor, self cleaning capabilities, student ID swipe access which has access to your personalised timetable so you never sleep through a scheduled class, noise cancellation, speakers for relaxing low volume music, air conditioning to keep the pod at an optimal sleeping temperature. [Graph picture - factors contributing to tiredness] We were surprised to see that everyone who took part in the questionnaire answered that they have been tired while at university. This reassured us that there is a need for a product like the Power Pod to be available to students. [Prototype pics, graph pics]  A lot of our feedback was positive but suggested that we address some concerns. The main issues raised were maintaining hygienic conditions, security of both self and belongings and privacy. The majority of people surveyed also thought that the space could be used inappropriately. To address the hygiene issue we would improve the pod by installing a frequent and easy cleaning system. To address the issue of security we will implement the suggestion of moving the control panel inside so that only the occupant has access to opening and closing of the compartments. To address the privacy issue we would create a dedicated space for the pods, this will also help reduce distractions and noise level. We learned that doing background research was helpful to inform our ideas and give context to them. By doing this project we learned that prototyping should be done quickly with as much time for feedback as possible so that improvements can be made for the next iteration of prototyping. We learned that open ended questions asking why and how gave us the most valuable feedback. We learned that the feedback we received from showing our prototype was much richer than when we received feedback when we verbalised our concept to the class. This showed us how important visualisation is for people to understand and give critique.