Location/Environment Project Evaluation

The brief for this project was to ‘design and present your ideas and working prototype for an interactive kiosk/advertising with AV content’. This was a group project and would be worked on in pairs. Keywords - reactive, site-specific, physical interface.

The idea for the project was to create something innovative and creative to be set in art gallery cafes. The kiosk would be a large screen mounted in a specifically designed table with different phidgets built in such as a slider, a vibration sensor, and a touch sensor. Each phidget would activate a different animation and a joystick would give the user the ability to draw on the screen (see design boards).

Throughout the project an online journal would record thought processes, research, design ideas and notes (see online journal entries). This would help record each stage of the project and keep it on track.

To create a prototype of the interactive kiosk Adobe Flash CS3 with Actionscript 3.0 was used along with a Phidget interface kit. The project was challenging as it involved using unfamiliar software and technology. There were many problems testing the kiosk prototype, as the university computers were often not connecting to the ‘local host’ needed to use the phidgets. This made the project frustrating and slow. The scripting was difficult as tutorials involving phidget interface kits were tough to find, although seminar sessions were extremely helpful.

Towards the end of the project it was decided to only use the two main phidgets, the joystick and the vibration sensor. It was agreed that this would be the best action to take due to time constraints as it would be better to have two phidgets that worked well and without problems rather than struggling on with all four and possibly ending up with none working. This was a disappointing step to take but a necessary one.

The scheduling in this project was not up to standard, which, in turn, made the work difficult to plan out and divide up between the pair. In future it would be a better idea to carry out more research into what creating the prototype would entail, so that preparation and scheduling could be more detailed and exact. If it had been known prior to starting the action script work just how difficult it would be, more time would have been allowed which would mean the project would not have been compromised and changed at the last minute.

In this project, feedback from seminar and tutorial sessions were extremely beneficial to the idea and design process. This is important in any work or project as without feedback no one can be sure how well he or she is doing in context. Research is a key starting point to any project and it must be thorough or it will prove to be useless later in the task. As always, a time plan is crucial to success. It helps to keep work on track and on schedule, without it the project will end up lost with no plan of where to go next. It is important to learn from both the positive and negative aspects in this assignment in order to progress in the future.