Prototyping for Design¶
MICRO CHALLENGE I¶
Repo: https://github.com/mdhelomme/MicroChallengeI
We wanna help people to communicate their ideas, opinion and experience about drugs without using the voice, by creating a tool that could help them speak without speaking. Why? Because sometimes seems hard to talk and express opinions about specific topics, if it feels like they are being denied by society and there’s no enough freedom to bring the conversation to the table, and especially to share a personal experience, positive or negative an habit or even an addiction related to something illegal and usually misread.
The lack of communication and dialogue in the topic brings a huge lack of awareness and information in the topic itself. Also, sharing can prevent other people’s harm.
We want people to feel comfortable in sharing personal opinions about drugs, that’s why we designed a simple tool, a sharing board, that it’s seen multiple times in different occasions, as a way to normalise the topic. We wanna give a non judgmental tool to gather data about drug use in different locations (street, music festival, bars, uni).
We designed the board starting by a topography map to give a modularity aspect and not to limit ourselves with a squared board. Also, the shapes of the topography allows to create different shapes and adjust the board by preference.Once that the shapes were fixed we developed a flow of answers that could represent statements related to drug and then we placed them in the rhino file. We first prototyped the board in cardboard to test it out and then we laser cut it on plywood. The whole board that starts with a question: “Do you do drugs?” The YES and NO answers correspond to a thread and then the journey begins as a flow of answers to communicate personal opinions and experiences. Close to each answer we put a nail were a thread can be attached as a “yes I do”.
THE INVISIBLE ANSWERS
We know that being honest, with themselves and others, about drugs is not easy, so in order to allow people to feel more comfortable about sharing we came up with the idea of the invisible answers, more intimate and difficult statements that might be hard to point out in front of others. These answers are not laser cut in the board, instead we printed weird shaped stickers (that are connected to aesthetic of the project) on blue vinyl and then sticked them on the board. Using an augmented reality development package and ARKit, we then developed an app which allows you to individually scan each icon (stickers), and in return, the app displays the “invisible answers” on your phone. The app however, is limited to individual deployment, thus we have to deploy it on each IOS device by building it through XCode. Having said that, the code is currently limited to IOS builds.
So eventually each participant could feel like living in an open space where to share, even more intimate and private stuff related to drugs. This project is part of a wider project called DRUGS YOU BETTER KNOW that soon will try to participate to a Sonar open call for artistic and technological projects working at the intersection between art, technology, sciences, and society, aiming for ideas that see the development of AI, VR, AR. We’re also developing a VR immersive experience to break walls of prejudice and conservatism to open dialogue and reduce drug harms at festivals.
Self evaluation and reflection This whole week was very important for the development of a project that’s part of a bigger picture, of something that we’re trying to bring out of IaaC’s walls and show it outdoor in specific context. Having the opportunity to actually prototype something gave us the opportunity to face pros and limits of materials and techniques that we might used. We managed to get comfortable with many tools in the FabLab that before we didn’t know how to deal with. This specific output is not going to evolve but it widened many ideas related to it. It was really challenging but satisfying to finally learning how to actually use machines in the FabLab and putting in practice the “learn by doing” method. I think we could have pushed our limits more and going a bit further, maybe exploring some programming with Arduino, I guess we’ll leave time for that in the second Micro Challenge Week.