- A brief introduction: For our Physical Computing final project, we (Team Figs: John, Julia, and Shenai) met with our client, Justin, in order to interview him regarding what he might find helpful in an assistive device. On Wednesday, November 3rd, we all hopped on a Zoom call to get to know one another and kick off the ideation for the project.
- Your meeting agenda: The plan we followed was largely drawn from the Physical Computing website, namely this section about conducting interviews. It looked like this:
- Introduction
- Go around introducing ourselves, what we do, give some background into the class, why we’re taking the class, and into what we plan on doing
- Ask the same of the client + insight into their motivations for volunteering for the project
- The project itself, from the notes:
- Trying to build prototype useful devices
- Engaging in an iterative design process, including gathering formative feedback around the midpoint of the process
- Taking about six weeks to go from this meeting to a reasonably high-fidelity final product
- Documenting our process
- We are not:
- Professional technologists who are experienced in making polished products
- Planning to build something that will be sold commercially
- Constrained by any practicality outside of usefulness to the person we’re designing for
- Likely to invent a totally novel piece of electronics (we combine many existing available components in new ways, but don’t make components)
- Timeline:
- This meeting as an introduction between us, figuring out what your needs are and what you would like
- After this meeting, we’ll talk about our options, decide on a path that seems feasible, and then start drawing up sketches and prototypes
- The next few weeks will be a process of prototyping something, figuring out what works and doesn’t, and then working on refining and polishing that design until we finish up in early December.
- The actual meat of the interview:
- Starter question: directly ask if there are any activities in their daily life that are challenging or difficult for them to do that might need assistance
- Follow up questions:
- ask them to go through a day in the life of and about their usual routine
- ask them to demonstrate anything or pantomime parts of that daily routine (observe for any difficulties we might be able to help with)
- ask about any hobbies that are challenging
- Afterwards if capable, follow up with sketches or our ideas for designs in order to solve these solutions
- Afterwards:
- reiterate contact information and timeline for the project
- Meeting summary and major takeaways:
We learned that Justin has been blind since birth, and much of our collaborative (between all four of us) ideation surrounded finding ways to adjust to that impairment. Justin came in pretty prepared, and proposed ideas such as a:
- Device that makes coffee in the mornings—some type of device that tells whether a cup is full or not (don’t want to just put finger in the liquid so it doesn’t overflow)
- Digital scale that is able to read to him (making turkey, reads out “4.5 pounds”), including a tare function
- Meat thermometer that can read him the temperature
- Braille display
- Light in room detector using pitch to reflect the level of light
- Guitar tuner helper device
Along the way, we discovered his love for music (and his YouTube channel!), especially guitar, and our conversation came around to the idea of a device to help tune a guitar, that might be able to interface between a set of external speakers. This would be a physical, easy to use alternative to digital applications or more visual-based tuners.
As the meeting progressed, we discovered that many of these devices are actually already available on the market, but exorbitant pricing posed a barrier to Justin purchasing some of them. Additionally, we learned the scales for blind people that are on the market aren’t really that accessible—despite reading out the number of pounds of an object, the buttons didn’t have braille markings on them, making different functions basically indistinguishable. As a result, we considered trying to build a low cost alternative to some of the already available designs.
After the meeting, we fleshed out more ideas for the potential devices, such as using an ultrasonic ranger for the liquid detector, pasting a braille strip that says “for Justin” on our final project for a touch of personality, or getting clips of numbers being read out for the digital scale. We also ruled out the braille display, as it is very complex and out of scope for our resources/time, although we did note other kinds of detail that braille could add when working on designs (such as having buttons marked with braille).
- Your thoughts after holding the meeting and discussing as a team:
We went totally off the rails from our agenda as Justin had already thought pretty deeply about what might make his life easier, immediately bringing up his own ideas that he had already prepared. Conversation was pretty smooth after the initial bumps of getting everything set up, and we all enjoyed talking to him and figuring out collaboratively what devices we could make that he could also use. We were even able to refer back to our initial meeting agenda after we had gone through his prepared ideas, being able to come up with even more by asking about his hobbies and if there was any way we could build something to aid in those. Although it would have been good to get a precise idea or a specific one that Justin is looking for in particular, Justin reassured us that he would be happy with whatever we would be able to provide. We were ultimately able to come out of the meeting feeling far more secure in the kinds of things that we’re going to be building for Justin due to the conversations we had.
Some of the questions we have for Justin now is regarding his preferences with the user interface of out design, such as what size should braille letters be.