Urbbi has a voice! Although a slightly generic boring voice for now but I’m working on his pronunciation!
As described in my earlier weeknotes Urbbi is currently reading the light levels and moisture in the workshop at CIID. I think the light being so erratic is due to the crazy building going on from the class of CIID 2011 in the workshop at the moment! Or some kind of calibration issue, I’ll look into that later.
For now heres, the light levels.
And the data for Moisture.
Update on the weeks work in the workshop. I got Urbbi winking a little hello. I guess he need’s another eye before he looks like a pirate!
So once again I combined the weeknotes for the past two weeks. As things get busier in the workshop/production phase I have less and less to reflect on. I wanted to use these weeknotes as a way for me to reflect on the direction and process but I find more and more towards the end of this short project that it is slightly harder to reflect on the decision made during the design/prototyping stage because a lot of the time they just feel instinctive or as if it’s the right choice to make in order to progress.
In any case, I decided to force myself outside the workshop and sit down to reflect for just a moment on the direction I have finally decided on taking and in what way it answers the design challenge I set myself some time ago. The first thing that is obvious is the slight change in context of the design proposal. I have (through co-creation and experience prototyping) taken a step away from the ‘service of convenience’ model and more into actually helping people care for and grow a garden themselves. This is mainly due to strong feedback about the current real issues around maintaining a growing project at home. Also the idea of resonating with current, ‘cool’, technology as a platform to use in inspiring younger adults was another key piece of learning. Simply put, young people are increasing connected through devices they find cool. Why can’t something that needs to fit into their lives be the convenience side of the story? Of course I’m not saying that the delivery service concept couldn’t lend itself to this interaction also, but it seems more of larger step for people to identify with. You need to explain the service, then the interaction, then the value etc. It’s a longer, more obscured story as you are having to actually design the CONTEXT as well. (Herb subscription services don’t exist as far as my research suggests).
Enough of what I’m not doing. What I am doing is providing help in the form of, essentially, a little sensor box that sits on your freshly bought herbs or tomato growing project or chilli plant in the kitchen and provides you with a “How am I doing?” sort of information directly to iPhone through a web service. But instead of just a number, a tweet or a bar graph as feedback, what you are presented with is a data relationship specific to the place in your home that you put it. For example, someone growing a pot of basil may know that basil needs sun. Placing the pot with the sensor box on his window sill seems the obvious choice. However, having a radiator under the window sill means that water in the soil (of which basil also needs a fair amount of) seems to dry up quickly. So although the spot seems perfect based on the information provided wherever the basil was bought, actually it’s not. How would you know that? Another example. Am I giving my basil too much or too little water. To you and me looking at a basil wilting, it’s hard to know. It’s hard to remember. Is it dry? Didn’t I water it yesterday? Oh no did I give it too much? This is the lack of information that I am hoping to address. But this isn’t a new thing. Sensing our environment, specifically our home environment, has always been an interest for many who want to save money and energy. And it’s playing an increasingly important role in defining the energy efficiency market. Having knowledge and thereby developing control over your environment is an expanding field that, in my opinion, needs serious attention in the design world in order to allow people to easily, quickly and WISELY make decisions that can long term effects and consequences. Such as the long term consequences, coming back to my project, of plants and horticulture that aren’t cared for in the right way that is specific to YOUR environment, YOUR plant and YOUR lifestyle.
This is what Urbbi is. Urbbi is your little urban gardener. Your little friend who reminds you in a delightful way about the consequences of your environment on the plants you keep & grow. It does this is many ways:
It provides status (What’s up?).
It provides the historical, environmental ‘rhythm’ of your home. (How’s your day been?)
It provides inspiration in the form of personal, communicable touchpoints? (How do you feel?)
It provides a network of other Urbbi’s and their owners that can provide help and support (What is it?)
And finally it provides the very beginning of control over your environment, albeit for now just your digital environment. (When the water is low can you tweet Anna next door to come and water it? Thanks)
How these will manifest is my on-going work at the moment so I should be able to show you the first prototype (v.1) end of next week when this project should officially finish under development at CIID.
(I am seriously considering developing the idea further after I leave Copenhagen however)
Finally, a bit more of an update on what I’ve been up to technically this week. I managed to finish Urbbi V.0.5 yesterday and hes currently sitting at the studio collecting data about light and soil moisture. He’s reporting the data to ThingSpeak.com and then I’ve written a super simple JQueryMobile page to grab the JSON data and parse it. At the moment it’s spitting out the last entry number but I need to heavily develop the interface this weekend to express what I’ve talked about above. I had a look at integrating a node.js server to collect the information (someone recently wrote a MQTT server library for node.js so could be interesting) but I doubt I have time to implement this. For now querying the data from ThingSpeak works very well. And it’s more beneficial maybe to have the data open to the public to use as they want in the future. I may plug it into the slight more well known Pachube but we’ll see. Urbbi also has data output as LED bar levels on the actual device which I am bit shifting so I need to design and implement the indicators as to reflect the web interface. (The question still remains, should I directly reflect the levels or should it’s interaction be slightly different? We’ll see.)
So that’s the plan for the weekend. On top of shooting a short film! Busy busy. So time to run I think, time waits for no man!
Last project weeknotes (10) next week!
An update from the shop floor. I’m heavily back into making the final prototype in preparation for testing over the weekend so this will just be a quick one. Note the action shot!
A belated update indeed. Time to catch up!
I was lucky enough to take back another batch of rapid idea prototypes to some of the people around Copenhagen I’ve been researching & co-creating with over past few weeks.
This time my concepts focused a bit more in the, if it’s fair to say, “digital realm”. The decision to tailor my prototypes more towards this was based on two things. Firstly, and unashamedly, I’ve grown an interest in developing a solution for urban gardening exploring it’s relationship with current advances in technology, sensing and social networking. It’s a like a personal inquiry. Can technology and growing something integrate better than they currently do? Secondly, a lot of the feedback I was getting from people using some of the early prototypes were highlighting inconsistencies in the way the product (or service) was conveyed through the form of an idea prototype and the reality of the solution to their everyday lives. something became clear. ‘Smart’ stuff is everywhere now. Including that particular gem, the smartphone.
I decided to incorporate some of these realities in an attempt to suggest ways that ‘smart’ technology can not only be ‘smart’ itself but also let YOU be smart. In essence that is what my project is trying to do, using growing as a context.
Here’s some examples.
For now I won’t go into the exact details of how they work or what they are, suffice to say that to the right we have a service/product to help and inspire people to care for their herbs or plants by providing feedback in a specific tone of voice (I will release a video soon to explain more). To the left we have a ‘seed starter kit’. Simple and similar to many on the market except this one encourages you to keep in contact with your seedling through email. A strange combination I know. Strange enough for user testing? Yes!
“No that’s really odd I would prefer the other one where it shows me on the actual box. I feel attach then. Like it’s my box. And it’s helping me out”
An important point was bought up at this point. People, you and me and everyday folk, develop interest in something progressively and often because of incentive. It’s why it’s so common for people who eat healthy to often find themselves caring for herbs. Some even find themselves trying to sprout their own herbs at this point. But the important point raised is that it’s progressive. Pushing a seed box onto the market without a real grounding in something that encourages, excites and delights people to care for something like a plant in the first place has an obvious outcome.
A main thing I learned again from doing this testing was a dual stroke. People want help in understanding the potential and problems of THEIR environment when it comes to growing and caring for a plant. If they don’t they can’t care. If they can’t care, they lose interest and give up. I think I describe everyone’s experience of buying a potted herb from a supermarket only to find it dead 2 days later.
“And I give it sun, and water but nothing. It died. I actually kept [the bonsai tree]. Maybe because I still want to know why…”
The weekends’ efforts. I’m definitely focusing in on something more and more as I busy myself in the design phase. It’ s one of my favourite times of a project when working through a problem with your hands and sketching you can really start to tighten up was has been a lot of open ended questions up until now. Most are just experiments and a way for me to think. More coming soon!
Thought I’d throw up a quick slideshow of last weeks user testing. I must say it was very useful and I look forward to developing the concept further. More details are coming in the form of my late weeknotes! Look out for that soon.
Never in my life have I had hot glue burns and brown fingers from soil until this project!
An update from the workshop here at CIID. I’m currently putting the finishing touches on the first round of prototypes. I have an experience prototyping session arranged for Saturday morning and so I have decided to postpone my usual weeknotes until Saturday/Sunday evening to make full use of the session. (And have something more to write about other than how hard it is to laser cut Coca-Cola bottle caps… ask me about it sometime!).
Quick update with some images of how the first prototypes are progressing.
Next week: modularity & Arduino. Looking forward!
Just finished the prototyping plan for this week and next. Six prototypes planned in all, each one slightly different from another but all using the service I’ve mentioned before as a core. The box will (hopefully) focus the prototypes a bit and help me get them done in such a such a short space of time so as to not get stuck in trying to design the perfect box!
As a bit of insight into my process below is a bit of scattered visualisation of my process from the research summary drawn up for brainstorming and through to my first design themes.
From my design themes I’ve laid out the six prototypes corresponding to each theme. Two prototypes for each theme exploring the concepts from the amazing brainstorming session I had here with fellow CIID’ers. Each prototype asks the questions posed by some of the concepts in a physical way so that I can get as much engagement in the experience prototyping sessions a possible.
The prototypes are:
Prototype 01a – Home delivery herbs
A plant box for your home that delivers information
Activity:
Set up a ‘herb-box’ (like a post box) outside flat/house and over time deliver fresh herbs.
Prototype 01b – Communal/Family activity
A plant box for your home that encourages information sharing in a local environment (family/communal living)
Activity:
A fresh box of herbs with labels on what the herbs are.
All the labels are blank and the participants need to fill in what information they would like to store there if it existed in the kitchen.
Prototype 02a – Sharing knowledge
Encouraging remote sharing of knowledge by leveraging the services existing communication channel
Activity:
A delivered herb box has a book where you can write or attach notes. The activity is to think of something you would write there to someone who may receive the same box in the future.
Prototype 02b – Physical connection
Encouraging physical sharing of knowledge and produce in a local community area (block of flats/neighbourhood)
Activity:
A communal box in the hall of a block flats that has take away cards with recipes and herbs. Front is the recipe and fold out are invitation tokens to people for dinner.
Prototype 03a – Modularity
A base (herb box) that allows extension to allow urban gardening at home. Encouraging great range of freedom in creating a growing system from the herb box.
Activity:
A herb box comes with fold out paper ‘limbs’ that suggest extension for extra growing space, watering system, embedded seeds, etc.
TBC – QR codes attached to the “limbs” of the box allows you to see blueprints of extendability using everyday items around the house
Prototype 03b – Networking
‘Making plants talk’. Physically effecting each others gardens/plants to teach & inform.
Activity:
A box with LEDS that indicate when the ‘master gardener’ is caring for the plant so you can join in. (LEDS specific to watering for now). + sticker that makes it clear what it’s about and it’s not just a light.
Let’s get making!
