This section will be a reflection of how this semester went particular in DECO3850 in my personal perspective, my thought about it as well as how well I think I did judging by the criteria I set for myself for this project, and of course how I tried to “survive” this course during this special period of time.
After world café which took place in week 4 of this 15-week semester, before covid-19 hit, we grouped our individual concept of interests together to sort them into different themes that we will be working on throughout the rest of the semester.
I personally am interested in the theme of “Body as Controller” at the time, and I thought that It’d be easier than other themes in terms of coming up with new unique ideas if I’m being honest. Before DECO3850, I also did DECO2300 which could be seen as the entry course for Arduino developing environment (Physical computing), and in that I made a game that is controlled by hands free of any sorts of controller with the help of Arduino.
As my understanding of the theme, the idea is to use your body parts to control something that ordinarily needs an external controller to control, for example, turning the TV on with a hand gesture instead of using the remote, flip a bacon on the frying pan with a wave of your hand etc…
Throughout the semester, I thought so hard and came up with lots of ideas that suit the theme of “Body as controller”, but the design process will be talked about in the Design Process page in the portfolio so I’ll only discuss my final outcome here.
The “Body” part of the idea is the presence of the user, by using the ultrasonic distance sensor, I was able to make a device that detects user’s presence by measuring distance between the sensor and the user, which is the physical input that this project uses. For the “output” parts of the project, there were several visual and sound elements to help the users proceed to the next step.
Ultimately this project aims to help students to reduce their level of study stress, and to achieve that, I researched into what helps lower stress level in general, usually common advice or suggestions like exercises, sleep, or socializing is the answer when you try to find the answer on Google alone.
Something that a lot of people miss could be as simple as better time management and a healthy work life balance, this is where it sparked my idea to make Breakbox.
However though, there are still lots to improve and refine if I were to have infinite time for this project and not worrying about deadlines or other courses or other responsibilities. One thing I really need to admit that this project lacks is the chances to user-test in person during the pandemic circumstance. Since design, UX design especially should never be a one-man project considering the product is made for more other people instead of the designer him/herself, at the start of the semester I already planned out the parts where I would do user testing iteration to refine the project until its deadline, however unfortunately that did not go so well.