Critical Design: Problem Solving
Process: I found it really, really hard to put together a list of 10 problems I had that were in some way relevant to each other. After raising that issue with Woody, I decided to just make a list of my biggest problems overall, with some personal problems and some global problems. We then had to pick one issue that we would try to design a solution to. 10 Problems Picking one single problem out of the list was no easy task. I wanted to find something I could use to make people think about why we take the problem for granted. Lots of people talk about not getting enough sleep, though nobody really seems to discuss what we can do to change it. The problem always seems to be attributed to the person who suffers from it. People tell them to go to bed earlier, take sleeping pills or to not use screens for an hour before bedtime. This assumption doesn’t usually take into account that the vast majority of these people simply don’t have enough time after school or work to get things done before bedtime. I knew I could help society as a whole by bringing more […]
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Critical Design: Personal Manifesto
Process: We initially had to look up other manifestos as inspirations, but I still found it a bit hard to create a personal manifesto at first. The rules I was thinking of were a bit too diverse and I wanted to keep it a bit related to each individual point. I chose to go with something very personal in the end. I wrote down some things I’ve learned the hard way over the years so others could learn from my troubles. For the visualization of my manifesto, I decided to write it on my own hand. This is to signify how important and personal these lessons are and how handy they can be others to read as well. Reflection: Writing a manifesto is a good way to figure out what you really stand for and what you believe in. My manifesto reminded me of what I’ve learned about myself too, and I’ve tried to apply the lessons I’ve learned more often since writing it. Manifestos are also a great way for bringing a message to people’s attention when they’re clear and concise. It’s something people should be able to read and understand what it is about, and if it’s a […]
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The Making Of Mortimer: Clocks And Arduinos
In this second part of The Making Of Mortimer, I’ll be talking about the mechanics and programming that went into making the physical manifestation of our chatbot actually tick. As I mentioned in the entry on Mortimer’s personality, we got an early start on our chatbot. We narrowed down the object we wanted to a clock in the second week of the semester, and by September 9th, we already had an actual clock to work on. We also had to work on ideas for the rooms during week 2, which is why I made a 3D representation of the Kitchen space as a rough estimate to get a feeling for what our room could be like. We were hoping one of the spaces would be a kitchen because the ideas we had for the dialogue involved our bot helping the user learn how to cook. We showed the model to the class after our presentation and it helped us narrow down the list of ideas to a Bathroom, a Living room and a Kitchen, as we’d hoped. Going in without any knowledge of the internals of the clock, our initial plan was to integrate a screen behind the glass panel near […]
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The Making Of Mortimer: Personality and Dialogue
In this part I’ll be talking about the making of Mortimer. Mortimer is the name we gave to our main project, the clock chatbot. I initially brought the group together to brainstorm about what we wanted our chatbot to be like in the second week, before we were even asked to do so by the teachers. We rather quickly came to the idea of making our chatbot a sort of parental figure, which would assist people in getting their lives in order. The concept was that the more you’d use it, the more it would teach you, the less you’d need it. The shape our object would take was going to be either a mirror or a clock. We ended up going with the latter as it’d better fit in a kitchen. When we were given were given a personality to work with in the random draw, we got the ‘Ruler’ archetype. This would fit in nicely with what we had planned already by that point. We’d just adjust it so it’d be a bit more oppressive, so that it’d seem like it’d be trying to stay in control of everything. The personality the other group that was going to […]
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Orientation Presentation on AI
You can find our presentation here. Early on, as part of our research/orientation phase, we had to look into AI and do a quick presentation on the subject. I volunteered to do it along with Nash and we took charge of making the presentation as well. The group did some quick research into AI as we veered off into a bit of an ethical debate/brainstorm. During this debate we kept a list of things we thought we should bring up and then we organised it into a presentation. During the presentation, Nash went a little bit off-script, so I helped him get back on track. The feedback on the presentation was pretty positive and we knew enough about our subject to answer the questions in the short discussion that followed.
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Protagonist Prototyping
You can find my prototype document here. When it came to actually prototyping our protagonists, we were told one of us had to pick the clock we had already bought for our final project. After some discussion within the group, I was the one who picked that part up. It turned out, a week or so later, that we weren’t meant to pick our group objects after all. I was already stuck with prototyping this, however, and had no time to adjust course at that point. We were sent out to go to thrift stores to look for some objects we could use for our projects. I figured it might be worth looking for other potential clocks. Me, Nash and Rikky went to Het Goed in Eindhoven to see if they had anything we could use but the trip was a bust since they had nothing any of us were looking for. I visited another 3 thrift stores over the next week but most of them didn’t have anything I could use either, or at least nothing better than what I had. My initial prototype was a 2D representation of the clock we started out with to rapidly test out […]
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Myself as an object
This was one of the first assignments of the year. We had to find an object that shares characteristics with us and bring the object to life. Before we even got started with this class, I took some personality tests and looked at some I had done a while ago. Based on these archetypes and personality analyses, and taking my own experiences into account, I started off sketching some doodles. I quickly came to either a suitcase or a book as an object to represent me. The book represents how I’m a bit of an autodidact and know a lot of things about a lot of things, whereas suitcase represents everything I’ve seen in life and everything I’ve been through. I chose to go with the suitcase. It’s not so much all bad “baggage”, more so that I carry a lot of stuff around and keep a lot of things in my head. I can find myself reminiscing about the past and I don’t always like opening up about it. Aside from all this deeper stuff, a suitcase is also an object I’m quite familiar with as I’ve seen a lot of the world during my youth. Having spent almost 4 years […]
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