Thinking About You

Project 4 required teams to create a novel interface to augment in-person and/or remote communication and collaboration. There was no restriction on the type of technology that could be used to create the interface, and so our team decided to create a digital solution suited for mobile phones. First, we went through an ideation process similar to that employed for previous projects.

Thinking About You

For the first stage of the design process, our team was required to produce 10 sketches, individually, of an initial idea for our prototype. Our 10 best ideas from this stage are outlined in the sketches below.

Sketch 1 depicts a Project board that provides live updates that can foster collaboration between users.

Sketch 2 illustrates the idea of using Augmented Reality to aid in instruction and learning in a large lecture hall.

Sketch 3 describes a way to send sticky notes to others in a digital way.

Sketch 4 describes the idea of easily adding images to a group document or sketch using AR.

Sketch 5 shows a device that provides a rotation of non-invasive digital images that act as conversation topic cues, which can be used when the user is on a date.

Sketch 6 illustrates a way for a user to provide live verbal directions to another person as they are making a journey.

Sketch 7 depicts a way for users to play a board game completely remotely, using Toio robots as game pieces.

Sketch 8 describes an AR arrow icon that helps users to find a specific person in a crowded area.

Sketch 9 shows an ambient light system that users can use to send different types of messages to each other in a simplistic way.

The 10th and final sketch depicts an interface that allows users to translate American Sign Language to English text, and vice versa.

Our individual sketches for our interface were largely ways of collaboratively completing tasks (sketches 1, 3, 4, 6 and 7).

For the next stage of the ideation process, our team was required to create 10 more detailed/variation sketches based on those created during the first stage. After reviewing all our individual sketches from this stage of ideation, we voted on the 10 best overall sketches, and proceeded to create our next round of sketches based on these top 10 sketches. These sketches can be seen below.

Sketch 1 is a variation on initial Sketch 8 from the previous ideation round that is specific to certain locations instead of a particular person.

‍

Sketches 2a and 2b are also based on initial sketch 8, giving more details on how the idea could be implemented.

Sketch 3 depicts a variation on this idea as well

Sketch 4 depicts another variation, this time specific to finding an item that the user has lost.

Sketch 5 is a variation of a different idea from the first round of sketching.

Sketch 6 is a variation of the Thinking About You idea (initial sketch 9).

Sketch 7 is also a variation of this idea.

Sketches 8, 9 and 10 shown above are a final variation of the Thinking About You idea.

After reviewing all our individual sketches from this stage of ideation, we decided that the idea we liked the most was the Thinking About You idea (see initial Sketch 9 above). We created a storyboard to illustrate our idea:

Due to hardware constraints, we decided to adapt this idea into a mobile application. The background of the application acts as the "light" and both users may send input to each other.

Here is our Demo/ Presentation video for the finished interface:

Our project code can be found at https://glitch.com/edit/#!/thinking-about-you?path=login.html%3A24%3A26

Other projects: