Grounding Research: initial ideas and personal considerations..

Well, expanding a little on the grounding process, i have set myself a personal brief on top of the school outlines:

• budgetary constraints necessitate the Device Lab project leading on to the Device Studio (the Device Lab will be a technical exploration leading to a key working element in the Studio - a stable experimental platform)
• i want to create something for minimal money that is re-useable: an ecological, entertaining and functional piece of embedded design & technology
• looking to create a stable and reliable platform for future developments and experiments in robotics / autonomy / automation programming
• the capacity & payload of the device (if appropriate) needs to be adequate for any future projects

My budget for the entire project runs at less than 50$au per week, so as much as possible parts will need to be recycled / appropriated from other devices / machines etc...

The timeline i am working to is dictated partly by the schedule of assessments from school: the technical side of the project needs to be finished in 3 weeks, then there is another 4 weeks for the design, testing and implementation of a conceptual interactive device.  This conceptual device should explore the very nature of interactions, but in my eyes needs to have a practical grounding - i.e something that will be inherently useful to me now, and in the future...

Grounding Research: response to the Brief

In creating an object or device that has the capability of 'exploring user interactions', it will be necessary to first establish the various understood methods with which users or an audience can interact with a system.

This is especially of importance as the digital revolution gathers steam, and the paradigms of ubiquitous and all-pervasive computing begin to take hold to the greater society.  Automation is a reality, the power is at our fingertips, but often (currently) it is the interface which is the problem - the methods of interaction are not designed / optimised for the user or the task at hand, too obscure, and often too complex to be useful...

It is this idea of simplification, the reduction of all complexities leading towards the instant access of all key functionalities of the device that drives the process of practical interface design.

However, as humans we naturally enjoy communication and often engage in acts of pure playfulness just for enjoyment, and it is this that defines our nature and should define the nature of our interactions also... Boring devices are just ... well .... boring!

Grounding Research: the Brief

In short, the project brief and context can be summarised by the terms 'Open Innovation' - the process of making oneself permeable to the flow of knowledge from all sources.  It is to be an exploration of the thought patterns, intentions and considerations involved in the creative design process.

The idea is to build a device to 'solve an everyday issue' or a more abstract device that does something interesting (such as the audio shaker created by Mark Hauenstein and Tom Jenkins); with the focus being on exploring abstract user interactions.

This project is submission for the IDEA 9201/2 course at the University of Sydney Architecture faculty.