Brief
Conceive make and wear a design that extends human senses beyond the body
Team-mates
Jumleena Bhagawati, Chia-Lin Ma (Jolin), Mohammed Bekkaoui (Beck), Weiting Chi, Changlin Hou (Charlie)
Date
06/10/22 - 13/10/22
Welcome to UX of Human senses. For this project, we had to conceive make and wear a design that extends human senses beyond the body. We had to do an exercise where each group was allocated a sense and a place. We were encouraged to exaggerate and document our experiences of this sense as we explore our location.
In this blog post, I have presented my documentation of our experience, observation, research, and the prototype-building process that we did as a team of 5 on this project. I have also discussed the feedback received on the prototype and my reflection on the week's work at the end of the post.
- Timeline -
- Recap -
In the first week of the brief we created a small scale prtotype of a life sized game concept wherin the wearer would be blind-folded and made to float on a magnetized wearable floaty in a pool which would use the power of magnetic feild to signal the body to true north and hence find out thow to navigate to the direction of food (which will be given as NE or SE etc)
- New idea generation -
Finding it hard to make magnetoreception experiencable we decided to immerse ourselves into the relm of speculative design. The plot for our story is : In the not so far future earth has been hit by calamaties, mankind is forced to live underground. The axis of eart has also tilted and food is only available up north. Our protagonist Peter will be the survivor who navigates the land using his enhanced power of magentoreception while wearing his suit and his never ending supply of oxygen and water.
We took inspiration from a few works of Kenyan artist Cyrus Kabir, who crafts striking, whimsical, colourful pieces — most famously his one-of-a-kind spectacles, C-STUNNERS — from recycled waste and objects he finds on the streets of Nairobi.
All images are courtesy of SMAC Gallery unless otherwise noted.
- Design Process -
Brainstorming & Sketching
Our team first diverged to brainstorm out a few concepts of our design idea. Taking inspiration from Cyrus Kabir we focused on creating a wearable around the furturistic concept and sketch out the design.
We worked out the hypothetical mechanism or our concept in a way that if one decided to make it for real, with a little bit of engineering, it would potentially work.
Working on the Design
For our concept, we used mostly scraps and materials that were readily available in the storage room.
First we decided to make the head piece of our wearable which would serve as the headgear used by our protagonist peter in his dystopian world. It will connect him with his supply of everlasting oxygen and water.
Next, we decided to create the body with the fictional filter units that produces the supply of oxygen and water through a catalytic process. A compass was also added to the bodice inside a frame and it was made to hang around the neck. The purpose of the compass was to correctly point to true north with the aid of megnetorececptive signals coming from Peter's head.
We added a fictional chip and a few blue light to the headpiece to highten peter's sense of megnetoreception.
After that, we added a two retractable appendages to work as a protective gear /shovel for peter to use while he digs through the underground in his quest for food.
Challenge
The challenge that we faced in this brief was making a wearable which extends human sense beyond the body out of a sense which was in-experiencable. This made our design for the concept unclear. Even though we realised it, we were struggling to find a different way around it.
Goal
We tried to develop a fictional world where our design concept for a sense usually in-experiencable by human sense will be experiencable for protagonic. With this plot we tried to showcase our design which we speculate will be attainable in the not so far future.
- Prototype -
After finishing with the design our team-mate Charlie modeled the wearable for us.
- Evaluation & Feedback -
Finishing the final week, our prototype was presented by our classmates at UAL. The concept for our prototype was very well received. However, as it was a wearable that was non-functional, there was disappointment expressed in the feedback.
After seeing the demonstration the class came up with the following insights to aid us with our concept and design further down the road:
1. To have added some form of magnetic interaction to the design.
2. It did not fall in the category of speculative design.
3. Considering the topic was a little difficult we could have opted for another human sense to work on.
- Reflection -
After analyzing the feedback we realized that even though we tried hard to create a interesting looking design we failed in providing an experience to the users. It was hard to navigate through the breif with megnetoreception being the human sense given to us as research on magnetoreception in humans is very limited. It is widely accepted that the Earth’s static magnetic field is not sensed by humans, while alternating magnetic fields [Nordmann, GC et al., 2017], such as power frequency fields [Maslanyj, M. et al, 2010] and pulsed fields[Vadalà, M. et al,2016], can have adverse health effects and therapeutic applications, respectively. We could not find enough information on how animals expereince it as well, with the sense being just described as a natural instinct. We realised that we could have moved on to a different sense but as a group we were too head strong to just give up without a try. Maybe next time we will be smarter.
Working with my first group of MA UX was absolutely rewarding, even though despite stressing out and trying our best we could not deliver the best experience, we had the best time collaborating with each other! It was a great first introduction to the process of how the breifs works the best first introduction to the course in general.
- Reference-
Maslanyj, M., Lightfoot, T., Schüz, J., Sienkiewicz, Z. & McKinlay, A. A precautionary public health protection strategy for the possible risk of childhood leukaemia from exposure to power frequency magnetic fields. BMC Public Health10, 673. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-10-673 (2010).
Nordmann GC, Hochstoeger T, Keays DA. Magnetoreception-A sense without a receptor. PLoS Biol. 2017 Oct 23;15(10):e2003234. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2003234. PMID: 29059181; PMCID: PMC5695626.
Vadalà, M. et al. Mechanisms and therapeutic effectiveness of pulsed electromagnetic field therapy in oncology. Cancer Med.5, 3128–3139 (2016).
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