The radius decay sounded like a good idea to look further into. We decided to work on objects and interactions people lead within their 2m radius.
For this, I decided to do a little experiment with paint. Whenever anyone came close to me, I’d put on paint of a different color on myself on the areas where the person has touched me. This turned out to be a good experiment because I became cautious about people trying to get into my 2m radius.
I distinguished the touches with the help of color.
Blue- touch of family
Pink- strangers
Green was myself.
I discovered that I had a lot of pink stains, which meant unknowingly, a lot of people were coming in contact with me. Everyone else in the team also did the same experiment and we compared the results. The pink paint was a lot more than we expected. We also noticed that it was impossible to put green paint every-time we touch our faces as it was a lot.
The paint experiments gave us a good insight into the type of people as well as the intensity of people who enter into our 2m radius. We also wanted to discover the interactions which people have with objects. We decided to do an AEIOU research.
After analyzing these research findings, we found out the following points-
It is essential to track human contact with people unknown to you.
Some places are crowded with people 247, while some only happen at a specific time.
Some physical contact happened unconsciously and the chance of spreading through human-object interaction is high.
Living conditions affect social distancing.
There are different level of trust depend on the relationship with people
After this analysis, we started thinking about some concepts. They revolved around tracking human contact through the overlapping of a 2m radius.
We had 3 concepts.
Concept 1 (Amber and I) — User has a device, similar to a torch, that sheds light. Whenever one's radius gets overlapped with someone, the color changes. We also thought about living conditions where this would not be possible, so we tried combining radius’ of people who live together.
Some strengths were instant color feedback, and control in hands of the user. Some of the weaknesses were that it does not record data, and it will get messy on places like public transport.
Concept 2 (Nancy) — A device which has 3 buttons and works on GPS. It shows green for safe, amber for exposed and red for infected. When the device shines amber, it means they have come in contact with someone infected and must isolate immediately.
Concept 3 (Felix) —An idea of a young family tracking their grandparents who might be familiar with current technologies, but we thought that would create more socially complex problems.
The main concept of generating trust was that it gave control to the user, and were tracking themselves.
Feedback
We had a midpoint review with Stephanie, from TTC, and we presented these concepts to her. She liked the interaction of the lights but encouraged us to think about how we could inculcate this into the real world. She also spoke about what happens when the coronavirus ends. We are all learning new habits and what happens when things start as before?
She also told us to think about the 2m radius as a new way of measurement and gave us an example of schools using animals to show a 2 meter distance to kids.
Takeaways
As the presentation was only 10 minute long, I learnt how to explain design concepts within that time frame. It is also critical to think about your concept from a different perspective and first understanding the problem framework. I realised that we had missed an opportunity to rework on our problem frame and decided to look at it through a new lens.
Relation to reading
Tonkinwise's 'How We Intend to Future: Review of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming' was the reading for this week. It spoke a great deal about Dunne and Raby's description of the cone of future. According to Tonkinwise, we have not considered the cultural differences while talking about possible futures.
This led me to think about how while designing we have not considered a lot of the outliers. Their starting point of the cone would be very different from those at a privileged point of view.
How can we design for people at different points in the present?
References
Cameron Tonkinwise (2014) How We Intend to Future: Review of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, Design Philosophy Papers, 12:2, 169-187
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