Product & Treatment idea # 2

Product 2:

Name of Treatment: Augmented-Respiration

“Augmented” means to add to or to improve an existing thing, “Respiration” means to pass air or water through respiratory organs and is another word for “Breathing”.

Description:

This treatment gives the individual mechanical gills enabling you to breath underwater much like a fish. The treatment also lowers your base body temperature enabling energy absorbed by food (possible side product) to be used to regulate a constant body temperature while underwater.

Science Behind It

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACQr0IZIb5I

The gills enable the human lungs to absorb oxygen gas (o2) instead of H2o resulting in the lungs being able to extract enough oxygen while underwater to function safely.

Why we need this treatment?

This treatment is designed for the possible futuristic scenario where the world has become overpopulated and people are now living beneath the sea. This treatment basically makes this feasible.

Product & Treatment idea #1

Product 1:

Name of Treatment: Nycto- elucidate

Nycto is the greek for night or dankness and elucidate means to illuminate or clarify

Description:

This treatment rapidly decreases the time taken for your eyes to adapt to darkness as well as greatly increasing visual resolution (Visual Clarity).

Scenario it’s Designed For:

This treatment is targeted at people who work during the night or work in dark environments.

Science Behind It:

This treatment rapidly decreases the time taken for your eyes to increase its cone cell sensitivity and level off. This treatment also simultaneously decreases the time taken for the rod cells to begin to adapt to darkness. At higher light levels they are inactive and cones determine threshold. As time passes, they increase sensitivity. Naturally it can take around 45 minutes for your eyes to adapt to darkness however this treatment rapidly decreases this time. Visual clarity is increased by reflecting direct light.

Why we need this treatment?

Twilight is a common time for outdoor accidents. Contrast sensitivity declines rapidly as the eye moves to mesopic operation. The sun is still providing both foreground and background illumination, so artificial light sources, such as car headlamps are less effective. In addition, visual skills, such as reaction time, fall rapidly (Campbell, Rothwell and Perry, 1987).

Rich Media Channel Project

For the past two weeks me and my production group have started designing ideas for a futuristic web channel. During our initial meeting we collectively agreed that our channel should be about "Health". During our one day project we brainstormed potential brand ideas for example out very first idea was to make a brand which focused on futuristic cosmetic surgery as it's likely that stem cell research in the future would enable thing such as skin transplants etc. We pitched this concept during our initial presentation and was able to give our brand a name and logo.

We decided to go with the name "Facade" as the brand values very much matched the meaning of the word, Facade means to disguise or a deceptive appearance.

After the initial one day project as a group we distributed various roles and tasks to do until we next meet as a group. I was tasked with developing ideas for the actual treatments and products as the group collectively agreed that we should change our brand so that our treatments are not about "fashion" but rather about providing improvements to the human body to suit scenarios much like a Chameleon would hence the look of the logo.   

Review Of Personal Development

Since the time I was at college and the time I've been at University I've been able to develop my technical skills in particular in web design. I believe I have an intermediate knowledge of of all of the programs in the Adobe suite and have often collaboratively used these programs in projects. While I've been at university I have been able to develop my knowledge in coding languages such as HTML5 and CSS, this knowledge will be significantly important especially when I've completed the course and looking for professional work. I've learnt that its not primarily technical skills which employers seek its instead critical thinking skills which they are interested in, this is because technical skills can be learnt and especially in the media industry you are always required to update your technical skills as technology develops. Critical thinking skills is a state of mind and isn't so easily learnt, it is a skill which employers will search for in an interview process.

Affordances

In one of my "Concept & Idealization" seminars we learnt about affordances. The word affordances in the context of technology describe the factors which determine how a user performs actions with an object. For example the physical appearance of an object can influence the ways in which a user interacts with an object such as handle bar on a door which when identified by a human would determine that the door needs to be pulled and not pushed.

However affordances can be interpreted differently by foreign cultures for example in the seminar the lecturer gave the example of chop sticks and some knitting needles which look pretty much identical however have completely different uses in different cultures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FztZH4FePtc

This is a factor which as designers we must consider when designing artifacts as the physical appearance of an object doesn't always give a hint to its use for example a computer mouse wouldn't initially be thought to as  a computer navigation device however as the mouse is very easy to use, the learning process is arbitrary as the user would eventually see the action and reaction of the testing with the mouse. 

It is argued that its best as designers to develop new technologies which are similar to existing technology for example in the game guitar hero the user is required to use a plastic guitar as the controller for the game. This had its advantages and disadvantages for example for tasks such as navigating the menus the plastic guitar is pretty poor as the physical appearance of the guitar doesn't really hint at how it should be used by the user to navigate the menus. However for the actual gameplay the guitar performed well and arguebly better than it would on a tradional controller.

It's somewhat easy for the user to understand how to use the guitar controller because the user would of identified how a tradional guitar is used and then would replicate those actions when using the guitar controller.

Tony Jebara. (). Action Reaction Learning: Automatic Visual Analysis and Synthesis of Interactive Behaviour. Available: http://pubs.media.mit.edu/pubs/papers/icvs.pdf. Last accessed 12th Dec 2013.

Fire Kills project

Our second project I was assigned at my time at university was a another presentation where I had to generate some ideas for ways in which we could promote a fire kills campaign. On the brief it specified that we needed to express various important factors such as; Planning an alternate exit, finding keys and not obstructing fire exits.

These important factors greatly influenced the design of our campaign. We initially conducted some research into other similar campaigns such as the "Think!" and anti-smoking campaigns which gave us an insight into effective ways of convey a powerful message. 

I started designing some posters for our campaign which focused on educating people on the risks of fires during the Xmas period. The reason we chose Xmas was because we are currently in the Xmas period and after finding some interesting statistics relating to Xmas tree fires we thought it would be appropriate.

The other part of our campaign was an interactive youtube game which had the aim of educating people on the important factors stated in the brief.

The setting for youtube game would be a student flat and a fire has just started in a section of the flat, the user is required to make decisions on what to do, for example the initial video would prompt the user to either run to the other side of the flat or try and exit through the fire exit (which would be obstructed).

We have designed the interactive game to not be insurmountable as we thought this would educate users more effectively. We would hope that having the game as insurmountable would result in the user thinking about the circumstances which resulted in you not being able to escape.

The reason we chose a interactive YouTube game is because YouTube can pretty much be viewed on all mobile devices enabling our campaign to reach a very wide audience. 

Overall I was happy with how our presentation went however it could of possibly been better if we had designed a functioning prototype of our YouTube game which may of enabled our audience to understand our idea better. 

I believe the presentation was well structured and we clearly explained the research we had undertaken and explained how that influenced our final design.

Bristol Zoo Project

The first project I was set at my time at university was to present an idea for a brand new interactive experience at Bristol Zoo. We were put into small groups and my group initially brainstormed various ideas which seemed relevant. One of the ideas was to have some sort of virtual African safari experience however we collectively agreed on the idea of constructing an area which physically replicated the habitats of some of the animals at the zoo for example an Arctic area for penguins and an ocean environment for marine animals.

We wanted this attraction to be as immersive as possible, so each area would have sound effects as well as physical props which replicate natural environments.

To make this attraction appeal to a wide audience we decided to implement a quiz into the maze which made the maze more fun as well as educate youngsters.

To make the customer's experience more interactive we agreed on designing a mobile app which serves as a companion app to the maze by supplying clues to the quiz but also gives background information on the history of the zoo.

Here's an image of the home page of our Brisol Zoo app

I designed the app so that it was as user friendly as possible and the ways in which I went about to achieve this was to display as little on the pages as possible. This is a technique I had learnt in one of the Concept & Idealization seminars. The lecturer explained how messages can be conveyed much clearer in a sort of "design vacuum" where the audience's focus is directed on a single part of the design.

However on some pages such as the Aquarium & Gorilla page is implemented some dynamic effects to the backgrounds. The reason I did this is because I didn't want the page to just include a load of text and a background image as this would make the page quite unattractive and would likely immediately lose the interest of a younger audience. I thought the dynamic effects would make the page more interesting which as a result improved the likelihood of the text being absorbed and read by the audience.

I overall think the presentation went well as every member of the group was able to convey our collective ideas clearly. We explained where our inspiration and research came from and how it influenced our design.