R U Experienced?

Exercise 2: Feedback Object January 29, 2009

Can you image this pot lid as a door bell? bicycle bell? musical instrument?

Exercise 2 prepares you for project 2 which will deal with feedback, metaphor, prototyping, and usability evaluation.

In Exercise 2 we want you to make, or find, and bring in to class, a device, mechanism, toy, gadget, piece of material, or some such thing, that creates interesting “feedback” when you interact with it.

The task is to choose something interesting, demonstrate its effect in class, and post 3 ideas to the blog proposing how you might “repurpose” the feedback. Each idea will somehow change or adapt the form or meaning or effect of the feedback.

For example you could make a simple bell from a glass pot lid. Striking your “bell” creates a chime-like sound, the feedback. For your three adaptations, one idea might be a door chime that rings when a button is pressed; one might be to mount the bell on your bicycle as a warning bell; the last might be to build a percussion instrument with five different lids.

For the exercise all we want are your ideas. For Project 2, you will actually build the prototype. You can change your final idea at any time.

You have two weeks for this exercise. Short presentations and “3 ideas” posts are due February 12 (Note this is 1 week longer than the course outline says).

We’ll talk about feedback in class. For now you can think about it as perceptible reaction to user input. Look for phenomena that trigger the senses, such as vibration, sound, light, movement, etc. For great results, stimulate multiple senses!