User/Case Study

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.

After sharing my results with thesis class, I got some good feedback about other questions I should be taking into account and other data that would be at least interesting if not useful to track. I am planning on making a survey in php this week that I can collect data through and hopefully post a link to in the next few days. Here is a full report of percentages from data that I collected during president's day weekend at shweitzer.
VIEW RESULTS

2/10/2008

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.  

Here are some images from the first round of hacking the remote. VIEW IMAGES

Mood Board

Me and Rebecca have been working more on the 'identity' portion of the project and she suggested making a mood board for some of the garments. We like the themes of 'disconnect', 'make your own lines', and other themes that have relation to both electronics and nature.  I probably am not approaching this the right way, since the fashion world and its practices are still a little beyond me, but I whipped up this little 'branding' image nonetheless. 

Circuits and New Direction

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

User-Centered Design:

"The chief difference from other interface design philosophies is that user-centered design tries to optimize the user interface around how people can, want, or need to work, rather than forcing the users to change how they work to accommodate the system or function." -Wikipedia

As an interaction designer, I really want my thesis to take me through all the steps of the user-centered design philosophy, especially since this project was inspired in a moment of need-finding eureka. Although these terms are typically applied to the design of software or virtual/screen-based interfaces and less with traditional product design, I think that a consideration of this process will be how I conceptualize and shape the project. There are many things that I will have to account for as the project develops more and more. Here are some initial consideration that have gone into phase one.

VIEW FILE

Introduction

The Glove Remote is an idea that I've had for a while, and attempted to make as my final project for introduction to physical computing when I first started at ITP. Now as I near graduation, it looks as though I have come full circle and am back to the same project, except this time with a full arsenal of itp experience to help it along.

To recap, the idea stemmed from the problem that has to do with most mp3 devices (more specifically, the ipod/itouch interfaces) that are extremely appealing for most situations, except those circumstances which you would normally be wearing a glove. The idea is to create an interface for skiiers and snowboarders that allows you to access certain much-needed functions for your mp3 device. (Ideally, volume up, volume down, previous, next). I have made the first proposal available through pdf.

Proposal 1


Rosie will be helping me yet again with the computational side of things, since she has been doing ipod in other projects since the first iteration of the glove. She keeps great documentation of our first project along with her other ideas using ipod control manipulation. The ipodGlove at the bottom of the page is my project while the other ones are things that she worked on after intro to pcomp.

VIEW FIRST ITERATION.