DETAILED VIEWS
Here are some initial sketches that I finally came up with based on all the interviews that I had done and notes that I had made during the last few weeks. I have done some fabric shopping in the fashion district to see if this is something I want to pattern make but for the most part I think I will stick to existing fashionware that I can modify to save time. I think I will have to 4/5 iterations to test out the durability of the prototypes.
MORE DRAWINGS
After doing the cursory filed research of asking random people what they were feeling when, I started sessing out my friends and friends of friends who would were avid skiers and snowboarders so I had a group constant that I could keep going back to for advice and to test prototypes. Many of them were my friends since this is something I do a lot.I really wanted to get in depth profiles of these people to see if there were any personality traits that were important to the design process or could help me with it.
The key things I asked them were :
1. Do you ski or snowboard
2. What level do you consider yourself
3. Do you currently listen to music
4. Would you consider it?
5. Why or why not? If you do already, why?
6. What do you find most annoying? Why haven't you already? 7. General comments of how you ride (alone/group/park/moguls?)
This week I rallied some friends together and made them jot notes during the weekend of their trips. They basically took journal entries of their entire trip with little SMS prompts from me every 30 mihutes or so asking them to write down what they were doing/thinking/and where they were. There were users who already listened to music all the time and others who were fist time users. I was interested in both groups of people.
This past weekend I spent in Idaho on Mt.Schweitzer doing a lot of user studies and surveying to see if there were any behavioral patterns I had not accounted for in my initial design considerations. I mainly studied people's skiing/boarding patterns with respect to ipod listening and came up with some interesting data. For the most part, mostly riders of expert and intermediate skill levels were the ones with ipods and out of that demographic, the ones who were out on their own had a higher percentage of music listeners. Due to the current interface of mp3 devices, people are more likely to take their headphones out that try to control their devices, and at the base/lfts, most people who use music players choose leave their devices off entirely until they have broken off from the group. Also, something that surprised me was a higher percentage of people listsened to music when the conditions were harsher than on the days where it was sunny with full visibility.
Last friday I spend the whole day trying to hack a remote and making as clean and robust as possible in case the pcb was going to be beyond my technical ability. I first tried running digital inputs on an arduino to the ipod header, and there was definitely communication between the two devices. Resistance values are still not certain so the connections were unstable and sometimes volume would keep increasing without digital contact. I'm meeting with Rosie on Monday to run the code again, and we will draw out a schematic so that I can get the pcb file ready to go.
After doing extensive research in the circuitry, I have decided that it will be more efficient to use the pre-fabricated ipod remote's male 32-pin connecter (which already accounts for the differences in programming for various ipod models) and print my own circuit board emulating the one inside the remote, removing the three leads that I do not need (audio left, audio right, and unknown third). This will only require me to figure out that type of 8-pin microchip converter that the company who makes these is using and buy them for my custom PCB. Also, this gives me more freedom to make the solder joints larger (ideally large enough to fit a need and conductive thread) so that they may be easily adjoined from the buttons to the conductive fabric. This will give me a lot of freedom in making the distance between interface (controls) and where the ipod is stored (32-pin header) as convenient as possible for the user depending on which garment the circuit is attached to.
On the other front of design, I have been looking a lot at the solar panel research I have already done with other projects, in hopes that I can use the panels in some garments to provide a trickle charge to the ipod. Depending on which generation ipod the user has, there is a large variant in the amperage that each internal battery takes, but for the sake of this project, I am going to use the latest specs for the last 2 models (ipod Video/Photo). I have also expanded this project to be an entire line of different garments that implement the same circuit. Ideally, I will have the entire circuit/pcb/materials, everything done by end of the month which will leave me two full months to focus only on fabrication and perfecting the design/implementation. I have chosen to work with Rebecca Jeffries from Parson's school of fashion design who is creating a more couture line of skiwear with the implemented circuits using sustainable and natural fabrics/processes/treatments. This idea of environment preservation and sustainability will hopefully have more and more of an impact on the decisions we make throughout the process since that is obviously a big part of nature sports.
Here's a look at the PCB that I will be modulated to make more wearable-friendly:VIEW CONTROLLER
