Octopus Garden Light Prototype
As a group, we decided on installing lights on Octavia’s leg as a feedback & affordance for people interact with the physical design components. Our general idea was to have people see lights going in & out to indicate the exchange/transport of interaction.
When it comes to the real building process, Maxine & I started the light design from body-storming possible reactions users might have with the light while hearing/listening to messages. Through body-storming, we considered many factors such as “will users get distracted by the lights when they speak?” and “Do people really want to see light that represents their emotions while they talk?” However, we agreed on the fact that a light should be shooting into/out of the octavia as a feedback design.
We started the prototype with Arduino & Simple LED lights. The first thing we prototyped was to have the light light up individually one by one. It was my first time playing with Arduino, and Maxine has a decent amount of experience with it so it was a great learning opportunity to me.
After we get the individual LED lights work, we decided to move on and start prototyping with LED RGB strip. This part was quite challenging because neither of us had experience prototyping with LED strip. The coding itself wasn’t hard but a problem that we encountered often was that when code seemed right, the light still simply didn’t run. We tried many ways to light it up but it didn’t really work. We realized that the problem might be due to the reason that the connection is weak due to the instability of breadboard so we had to keep iterating on the circuit to have as little connection injection as possible. And in the end it worked!
While we brought the light out to the garden to get people’s response. We tried different ways to the lights to light up. From user’s feedback, people actually enjoyed seeing the light twinkles as they talk because they feel like they are being listened. We also learned the importance of prototyping with real situations from this exercise!
