The Experience

So we're already in week 8 which is a bit scary. It's getting closer and closer to the business end of the year where I know things are really going to pick up in the commerce side of my degree. With a huge finance assignment due, an economics test, and 3 days of work per week for the rest of the semester I know it's going to take some planning and discipline to keep up some progress in this class.

As outlined in my week 7 post, while keeping up with the final making of the sharpener I really want to look over some capstone ideas now that I have my brief. Because I did Design 300 last year, I've already made a project proposal... that is completely useless to the new brief :(. So as recommended by my lecturer Nick I'll be looking to use this class to get a bit of a headstart on the project and figure out which direction I may want to go with it.

While the brief is different from last year, I was still drawn to the Emerging Technologies challenge, as I felt it still somewhat fit to my proposal on Māori mental health I created last year. My goal through the rest of this semester and even during the inter-semester break is to come up with a number of problems and new possibilities and from there see how current emerging technologies could be utilised to help solve them.

To begin I wanted to do a bit of a brainstorm before I conducted any research into the problem, just to get on paper how I may have initially processed this brief and my viewpoint on the direction to approach it before I am influenced by any information.

Below is a brainstorm looking at visitor experiences - more specifically common trends and key words, and specific experiences to Aotearoa.

After completing this initial brainstorm I got a better idea of my values and perspectives that surround visitor experiences. I think it is clear and unsurprising that I touched a lot on Māori experience in Aotearoa. I believe there are extremely different ways that Māori and Pākehā view our country and this could lead to different ways tourists therefore experience it. This will be something I will look further into as I start researching.

I also quite liked the idea of looking into how we perceive experiencing something and capture it. Outside of photos and videos, what other senses can we engage in a captured experience to make it more immersive. While VR is of course a default solution that comes to mind, I want to go beyond this and explore technologies that could maybe make this immersion more accessible and therefore impactful.

Finally in contrast I looked into some smaller-scale experiences of being a visitor. This included things like accommodation and how this adds to our experience, or luggage and language and how we manage these. Looking into more personal and intricate aspects of visitation like these could be another interesting angle to approach this brief simultaneously with the approaches above. This way I think I'll produce a broader range of creative ideas and maybe find ways they could connect.

The Sharpener Progress

Following last weeks successful prototyping with the code and breadboard, I felt ready to get building a functioning prototype. I found it pretty daunting knowing I'd have to build a prototype this time really being careful around the form, as wrong shapes or sizes could lead to short circuits in the wiring.

I therefore knew my first step was to visualise clearly what the sharpener would look like and then design the wiring in a way that may fit this form.

I wanted to start with a simple block sharpener with a space for pencil shavings, the sensor and the button for it to operate. This meant the form would be as simple as possible, and would give me plenty of room for the wiring to fit and hopefully not get damaged. I replaced the breadboard with the PCB seen above. These have copper coils running down each column where I can connect the power (+) and ground (-) wires to. I then ordered each of the wiring in order of where each part would be placed on the interior as seen above.

The Arduino will run along the back of the sharpener so the wires can all be easily connected at the back without needing to bend multiple different ways.

I knew for this I wanted to begin connecting and creating the wiring before beginning to build a shell that fits all the wires comfortably. I got to measuring all the wires out based on my sketches, then soldering them onto each component which took ages! Safe to say my soldering skills definitely needed some work, and my fingers were pretty blistered from gripping very hot wires for a few hours.

Then came my first significant setback which was..... it didn't work. After plugging it into power and uploading the code nothing happened. However, I knew because the light wasn't flashing on the Arduino it wasn't receiving power so it had to be something wrong with the PCB.

After consulting with Steve from the Design Lab he informed me I needed to cover all of the uninsulated wires and ensure that none of the solder from different polarities (positive wires and negative wires) were touching which would cause a short circuit.

As seen above the wires weren't attached properly so needed more solder to be secure to the circuit - preventing short circuits. Below the wires are very close together so if they touch when the wires bend this could also damage both the circuits and wires.

The way to solve this will be to add heat shrink to those exposed wires which essentially acts as an insulator so if the wires touch no current can be passed through. Unfortunately due to my extremely busy week, this will need to be something I look at next week.