Brief 1: UX OF HUMAN SENSES

Group 3: Hong Zhou, Kimberly Rodrigues, Reagan Bbengo, Cristèle Saric

Conceive make and wear a design that extends human senses beyond the body.

Research: Location-based documentation

A crucial part of our design process was the documentation of where thermoception might be particularly noticeable. We picked Saint Paul's Cathedral as a crucial location where our documentation of thermoception could be rich with conclusions. Sketches, video recordings of our teammates walking through the cathedral, and photography were useful documentation that informed our understanding of how the cathedral was built, how its architecture and stone structure affected temperature, and how we as visitors felt it.

Interviews

We interviewed people at the Cathedral to get further insight into how visitors experience thermoception at the cathedral.

Conclusions from interviews

- More than 3500 visitors per day - People often seek shelter from the rain in the Cathedral and do anything to get in - Cathedral is built in a way that it remains warm in the winter and stays cool in the summer - People are often seen wearing backpacks, shawls and rain jackets, and CAMERA BAGS - Most visitors are above 25 (Excluding school groups) - The Church is used as part of the queen's jubilee and s visited by prominent figures and the Royal Family.

conclusions FROM OUR research

Following our exploration of st Paul's Cathedral, we noticed that the location within the cathedral in which we could feel the most changes in our bodily temperature was the spiral staircase that lead to the top of the cathedral's dome. Because going up the stairs required physical effort, our body temperature naturally generated heat as one would after doing some exercise. The visual look of the metal spiral of the staircase was also an aspect that we heavily documented

The spiral staircase in the cathedral led us to do some further in-depth research about the architectural structure of the cathedral and how exactly heat is generated in places of worship.

Research into heat regulation to further inform our prototyping

In order to understand how heat is regulated through the body and how thermoreceptors work to create sensitivity to different temperatures, we created some small sketches which would later on aid us in building a wearable prototype.

Because St Paul's cathedral is a religious place of worship that involves the CHristian community, we found that linking the idea of worship, community, and the effect of such activities on human heat changes would be a viable lead to create our wearable prototype.

Making a wearable prototype

As a wearable, we took inspiration from items of clothing that maintain bodily heat , and considered alternatives to temperature sensations that could be worn, like cooling gloves. Because the brief stated that we needed to capture the change in temperature, the way we thought of rendering this was by looking more deeply into the possibility of thermo crystals (aka what is used in mood rings to change the colour). As these crystals react to temperature changes, we thought this would be an interesting way of visualising thermoception on a wearable product.

To read further about those initial iterations, please refer to our screengrabs of our low fidelity prototypes and brainstorming.

Making & challenges

One of the challenges we faced during our iteration process was agreeing on a direction to take. Because as individuals we all came from different backgrounds, we found it hard as a group to collectively agree on one direction to take. In order to overcome this problem, we found it easier to develop all of our three ideas and narrow down to one prototype which would ideally gather both the aspect that community has a great impact on how we feel heat, and a wearable/functional prototype.

Final prototype: The Maypole

Based on the feedback we received of our interim presentation pitch, we were suggested to hone in on one prototype to develop. This was deemed as a challenge due to our different understandings of the feedback received. As this was our first group project, we weren't quite sure on how to progress and reunite the team without conflict over what idea to develop. We therefore found it easier to keep iterating on ideas.

What we found as the cause of our creative block was the fact that we were still stuck in iterations specifically linked to religion rather than the sense of community as a whole. Once we figured this was the problem, we expanded our research into other existing forms of cultural gatherings that rallied people together as an activity.

Interestingly, a member of the team had lived in Germany, and had explained at one of our daily meetings that the maypole celebration was a form of gathering that brought people together to wrap fabric around a pole.

A Eureka moment was shared amongst our teammates and we found that this would be the best approach to gather our class together tp experience heat generated from wrapping black and white fabric around a 'pole' ( the pole being myself as seen in the final presentation).

Final feedback & reflections

Our human maypole received positive feedback as we created an experience which gathered our classmates and could be shared as a collective experience. Our users reported enjoying the process of attempting to create a pattern, although they couldn't necessarily feel heat as the task was too complicated to generate much physical activity.

Although as a team we had faced challenges with decision-making and time management, as a whole the project was an enriching one, and I had found the ,most valuable was our ability as a group to take form our own personal experiences to inform our making and ideating of our prototype.