Swing It!
This course focused on understanding frameworks around aesthetics of interaction, taking a personal standpoint in defining aesthetics of interaction and applying knowledge into the design of an aesthetically interactive alarm clock
Design
for aesthetic
interaction
Course Project
Aesthetics of
Interaction
Coach
associate professor
dr. Miguel Bruns
Collaborations
project members: Jin Smeding, Mirthe Visscher & Rong-Rong Zhang
Client
no client
Advisors
assistant professor dr. Kristina
Andersen
in short
Design challenge
This project was done during my second year of the bachelors. Swing it! is a tangible alarm clock that aims to calm down students after a long day at university, through re-designing the aesthetics of interaction of the alarm clock, making the experience less disruptive. Our design makes sure that the interaction with the alarm clock becomes part of the sleeping experience by the pendulum’s wooshy sound and its understandability.
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In the ideation we used Interaction Relabelling [5] with a nail clipper taking the context of a student willing to sleep into account. This helped the group exploring nail clipper features and alarm clock functionalities to focus on but also to reflect upon the sequence of action-reaction loops.
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With the first alarm clock concept in mind, we used Experience Prototyping [4] to make foam prototypes. This, to find a common understanding of the shape, the experience created and the goal for the clock.
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Because Aesthetics of Interaction slightly touches intuitive interaction, Interaction Frogger’s framework [1] got us thinking about couplings through feedback and feedforward to refine the design. This concept has been incorporated by adding pressure to pendulum when stretching it out further, LED’s that indicate the amount of hours the student will sleep, adding a wooshy sound indicating the clock is set and two black shapes clock illustrating handles to grab.
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See references in the added reflection.