My biggest takeaway from our class was being more deliberate and that I need to slow down. When I started this class, I was confident in a lot of my technical abilities regarding fabrication, knowing resistors, capacitors, soldering, and all that stuff. Around midterms, I realized that while those skills are great when your project is at that phase, they're really in the background. I needed to take a step back and start thinking about a project from the user experience and build out from there. I needed to find concepts that resonate and interactions that are interesting, then figure out how to make those happen. The form doesn't need to come at the beginning of the project. It's okay if my prototypes look bad.
My background before this was artist assisting and fabrication. Most of what I was doing was helping execute projects once those parts of a project were already fleshed out by someone else, and I conflated my skill set with the ideation phase a bit. I needed to really sit and think about what I was trying to achieve or explore, before going into making something.
Our robot is really simple, but in my opinion really fun. I am so happy we kept the internal components, circuit, and behavior limited, because I think we got to understand a lot of basics pretty well. Bluetooth was extremely challenging for me to initially wrap my head around, but once I got it, it helped me understand some really important core concepts applicable when programming any project with it. It's really important to add tons of redundancy to the connection process in order to make the piece stable and able to function if the connection gets dropped.
Using the built-in IMU and gyrometer on the Arduino was also a really nice way we could simplify our project while still getting a lot of time with fine-tuning the mapping to the motor drivers. Sana and I went through many iterations of how the gyro data manifests in motor movement and eventually landed on something that feels chaotic and silly, yet still controllable after some practice. We found a sweet spot, which we were looking for, and were only able to do that after iterating the code for weeks.
Unrelated to my project, but I am constantly thinking about how electronics and user-centric devices "see" now. Learning about the variety of sensors out there has really opened my mind to the way in which technology is actually interacting with us and our world, and I find breaking that down to be really fascinating.
My general hope with ITP is to steer my practice in a more industrial design-centric direction, and I feel like this class was a big step for me toward that goal, as I have now made something more functional than anything I had before.
Things I still need to get better with:
Documentation - Frankly, I am terrible at stopping to take pictures or video of something while I am in the middle of a project. I also do not love sharing my process once I am finished with it, as I want to move on to the next thing. These are bad excuses; it is a personal goal of mine to get much more diligent at documenting my work next semester.
Making my code more efficient and basing it off of example sketches - I am still wrapping my head around how to fully start in a direction with programming. I think it will come to me more naturally the more I do it, but I do feel rather directionless, and I need to keep reminding myself to check example code, as it serves as a great jumping-off point for learning Bluetooth. I am not thrilled about the code our final has, as we kept all the motor movement within a giant "while" loop towards the end of the code.
Playtesting - Asking non-leading questions is very difficult for me, and I greatly admire Sana's ability to communicate questions in a very neutral manner. I know this is not explicitly part of this class, but the last two weeks have had me thinking a lot about how to communicate about what we need input-wise from others about our project. Sana also really opened my eyes to the fact that giving users a goal really helps smooth out an interaction (sounds obvious when I am saying it now, but it wasn’t before to me). She devised a game in which users need to use the robot to knock down towers of blocks, and I think it’s a great way to encourage a user to make intentional movement with the robot.
I am really proud of what Sana and I built and I feel like we buttoned it up nicely. This class has been really helpful in not only technical knowledge, but how to think about my creative practice from a user-driven perspective.
Snippet of some play testing