2019-10-26/ Rain

 

Brief: Design an artefact that expresses the experiential qualities of gravity.

Partner: Lee & Yitong & Ana & Pat

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A new project started this week with the topic of gravity. I started to get this topic and felt very abstract. I don't know where to start. And this is the first time I have teamed up with classmates from different countries. I am both excited and worried. The excitement is that it feels a collision with different members of the group. I am worried that I am afraid that I will have communication problems due to language and cultural differences. I am still very much looking forward to this cooperation with our team members.

 

 

Previous Research

On Tuesday, my team members and I met to go to the Science Museum for research. In the Science and Technology Museum, we found a lot of knowledge related to gravity. Part of the museum is devoted to how astronauts live in the space station, and what changes in the object will occur in the case of weightlessness. We all agree that weightlessness is a particularly interesting point. After we added the basic knowledge of gravity to the museum, everyone decided to go home and summarize the feelings of today in the museum. We will go to the school library to discuss it together on Thursday.

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Topic Discussion

The inspiration at the beginning was that swinging, roller coaster, bumps when the plane encountered airflow, in these cases will have a sense of weightlessness. I also consulted some websites to understand the technology of magnetic levitation, which can visually bring people an object that is in a state of weightlessness. So I looked at a lot of videos about how to make a magnetic levitation device because it was technically difficult to implement. So I gave up on this choice. In our discussion on Thursday, Anna proposed the idea of ​​a drunk person, and everyone thought it was very interesting. A drunk person walks unsteadily, much like weightlessness. In the process of group discussion, because people who are drunk are more difficult to conduct research and observation, we want to start experimenting with some of the more easily observed behaviors around us. We think that when we jump down from the chair, there will be a feeling of weightlessness. So we found a chair, let ana stand on the ground and jump to the ground, then walked to the chair, then jumped down on one leg and then on the chair. The feeling of ana is that there is a dangerous feeling. The feeling of danger inspired us, so lee made an experiment on the stairs and down the stairs.

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Behavioural  Mapping​

Behavioural Mapping is a new design method I have learned. Designers can quickly record the path of a person who needs to be tracked in a public space. 

When people go up the stairs, it is a process of overcoming gravity. When going down the stairs, inertia is caused by quality. We chose whether to look at the stairs with our eyes when going up and down the stairs, whether we would hold the handrails, whether we would jump, and observe the stairs at the school gate as three observation points. A group of Yitong and Anna who observed the upstairs, I and  Pat observed the downstairs. Lee is responsible for the final summary. Finally, we draw the results in the form of sketches and make a model to express the data more intuitively.

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​Bodystorming

Bodystorming is also a new design method to helps designers derive new ideas and unexpected ideas by physically experiencing a situation.

Then we tested the body storm by combining the drunken person with the stairs. The first one is to let anna play the drunk, I play the wall, Pat and Yitong to play a series of reference objects such as chairs and telephone poles. The video is as follows:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second is that we chose to go to the stairwell of the school, let Pat and Yitong turn 10 times in situ, and have the feeling of dizziness, going up the stairs and going down the stairs. The video is as follows:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I find it very interesting in the process. It also made me gradually eliminate the fear of poor communication in the language.

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Presentation​

Our group is third to present. First, we talked about our source of inspiration and showed behavior mapping. When we were ready to play our bodystorming video, but John told us to go directly to the stairwell to show it to everyone. So a large group of people gathered in the stairwell, Lee played drunk people down the stairs, I played drunk people up the stairs. It is a pity that Yitong lost my video file up the stairs. There is the only lee up the stairs in the video:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think the scene effect is very good. Everyone feels very interesting.

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