Investigation III - Creative Project

tl;dr: Engage a line of spooky inquiry and by working in small groups, develop a piece for a larger exhibition that will engage invited guests (and potentially wider audiences) in Spooky Technology. Each group will prepare one prototype with supporting diagetic props and materials. Collectively, these prototypes will relate and/or network with one another through an immersive space.

Documentation Due: Apr 21 2023

Submit Documentation: http://ideate.xsead.cmu.edu/gallery/pools/rme-2023-haunted-smart-homes

Brief and Goals

The remainder of the semester is used to build a set of responsive, networked prototypes for deployment for public conversations. The organization of schedules, build time, and delegation of tasks was accomplished by the student teams. At the end of the semester, students worked together to identify a shared approach for a critically-informed responsive mobile environment, prepare a working prototype, and deliver supporting process and outcome documentation.

Brief: Haunted [Smart] House. Working in small groups, develop a digital exhibition to engage invited guests (and potentially wider audiences) in Spooky Technology. You will imagine a world where IoT devices are haunted by supernatural beings; where specters, familiars, or gremlins are fundamental components of of smart devices. Each group will realize a plausible but alternative IoT product or service that builds in the supernatural, the mystical or on superstitions. You’ll situate this discursive (and working) prototype in a room in an imagined (and haunted) smart home. The device will raise issues for public conversation through a supernatural, otherworldly, and spooky frame. Groups will develop supporting materials and props to create an immersive and interactive experience for guests. The prototypes will relate - conceptually or technically – to other experiences within the house.

Drawing on your explorations in the course, your interests, speculate on and imagine alterative smart home products with alternative values. Materialize these devices for public engagement and speculate on future possibiltiies for blended spaces. You are required to develop an initial proposal for your hybrid interactive space or installation.

You should develop at least one prototype that demonstrates your ideas around the issues with everyday technology and that uses a spooky line of inquiry in a productive way to reveal them. The possibilities are wide and varied. But you should:

Make - i.e. test your ideas and give them a form.
Research - i.e. uncover theory, ideas, and precedent projects that inform your approach.
Gather - i.e. find inspirational resources from speculative designs, design fiction, science fiction, etc..
Experiment - e.g. don’t just prototype the device and interactions but simulate/construct the data it might produce or use;
Document - e.g. test your ideas on yourself or others, how do you or others experience and encounter the device, what are your reactions and responses, document how you respond to it, what values it offer, and why it might matter to you or others.

Unusual approaches, left-of-center thinking and impracticality is encouraged!

Primary Precedent: Project Amelias Museum of Failures

Project Amelia is a next-level immersive theater experience that invites audiences to the R&D lab of Aura, one of the world’s most innovative tech giants, to participate in the launch of a groundbreaking intelligence product like no other.
Project Amelia is written and conceived by Michael Skirpan, and created by Bricolage Production Company in Partnership with Probable Models.
The Museum of Failures was generated by students in Responsive Mobile Environments and featured in the show. As part of the final project, our class was tasked with designing a series of speculative technologies that embed and voice potential issues of privacy, ethics, responsibility and impact of IoT products. These critical prototypes formed the ‘Museum of Failures’ a tour of abandoned products from Aura, an imaginary tech giant and were designed to draw audiences into dialog with plausible technologies that render consequences and issues of connected devices and AI.

Secondary Precedent: Addressing Network Anxieties with Alternative Design Metaphors

Optimism and positivity permeate discourses of smart interactive network technologies. Yet we do not have to look too far or too deep to find anxieties knotting up on the horizon and festering below the network’s glistening surface. This paper contributes a set of concepts, tactics, and novel design forms for addressing network anxieties generated through a design-led inquiry, or research through design approach. We present three technically grounded metaphors illustrated with examples selected from our exploratory design process. W eaving together concepts from surveillance studies, cultural studies, and other areas of the humanities with our visual and physical design work, we help draw attention to under-addressed concerns within HCI while proposing alternative ways of framing and engaging design issues arising with network technologies.

Learning Objectives

Develop and be able to critically reflect on the role and effects of technology in everyday settings
Develop an understanding of concepts like critical making, diagetic design and counterfactuals and how they relate to the design of alternative devices;
Build skills with prototyping hardware, electronics, and intelligent processes using tools like the Arduino Platform and tinyML.
Examine existing technologies and precedents that explore themes of spookiness, smart homes, critical devices, and responsive environments;
Investigate and respond to concerns and considerations that currently surround everyday technology and smart home devices through hands-on making and exploration.
Speculate on how hybrid objects and spaces (blended physical/digital space) might be used to create discursive designs;
Investigate sites (a room in the home) as a means to inform critiques of current and future possibilities for spaces and environments augmented with digital technologies;
Work collaboratively to highlight your existing skillsets, expertise, and perspective within the context of this course and understand how they might contribute to an interdisciplinary investigation by making work.
Plan, define and realize a room-scale interactive experience.

Constraints and Considerations

Constraints:

The project must realize a working interactive prototype, that can be performed in blended space (physical and digital components)
The poject must be situated in a defined room within an imagined home. No two projects may occupy the same room.
You must work collaboratively.

Considerations:

Use the project logs as both an opportunity to learn each element of this project one-by-one and an invitation to experiment!
Consider what are the issues, assumptions and ambiguities in technologies around us. Attend to these. Identify the expectations that someone might have of it. How might you creatively engage, subvert, defy or unmake those issues and assumptions.

Deliverables:

This investigation will be organized in two parts.

First you’ll complete and deliver an initial prototype for an internal crit on Apr 20th. For this you’ll deliver.

A physical prototype. You can take any approach to preparing this tangible manifestation that you feel is appropriate. This should be of reasonable fidelity to give form your your proposal, but will reflect your skills with prototyping interactive systems.
Other collateral to support the design (a flyer, advertisment, etc.) as needed
A demonstration and presentation of your process and outcome (5 minutes maximum)
Digital documentation of your process and outcome. Delivered on the gallery (see below)

Then, you will integrate feedback from this crit and refine your outcome to showcase to a broader audience as part of Meeting of the Minds on May 3rd. By the end of the seemster you will deliver:

An interactive prototype - You should create at least one full scale prototype of an element within the space to demonstrate the interaction with it. This should be of reasonable fidelity to give form your your proposal, but will reflect your skills with prototyping interactive systems.
Supporting diagetic props and materials. You should build the world around your interactive prototype by developing supporting materials that draw us into that world. This might include user manuals, product guides, marketing materials, etc.
A performance: in lieu of a final exam we will instead invite guests to an installation where they can encounter your prototypes, and discuss and debate the issues they materalize.
Digitial Documentation, comprised of

A catalog description of the work. To include a project title, credits (a 100 word bio), 500 words max description of the project, and 1 high resolution representative image.
A Process statement comprised of 1,000 words max describing your process, experiments and iterations and a minimum 10 media artifacts (mostly images) that represents various stages of the development of your concept.
A technical documentation that details how the final outcome was realized with sufficient detail that anyone knowledgeable with the same tools could repeat the outcome. This must include at least one diagram: e.g. an experience map or network diagram displaying the interactions between physical and digital components. It should also include a bill of materials, a list of technical resources used in the development of the project, and relevant resources to replicate the outcome (code, 3d files, etc)
A critical reflection that uses documentation of the visitor experience with your installation to articulate what was successful and what could be refined about your intended discursive experience.
A roadmap: the final piece of your documentation is to generate a well considered roadmap to take this project forward. In this you will describe an ideal — but feasible — implementation of your project that could be completed in a 12 week timeframe.

Revised Think Piece. Each person in the group will edit and refine their think piece as part of final submissions.

End of Investigation Documentation Requirements:

Include a write up of the following:

Intent: What is the intent of this project and how does it reflect a critical perspective? Write about the big ideas behind your project? What are the goals? Why did you make it? What are your motivations?
Context : Give examples of prior work, ideas and projects that influenced your design. What work informed this idea i.e. make links to the material in class and the cases/projects you uncovered in this module. Describe theory, concepts, and research from this module that relate to your outcome.
Prototype/Outcome: Describe your experience/working prototype: What did you create, how, etc.? What tools and technologies were involved? Include appropriate content and illustration (e.g. a concept video, a video of the device in operation, diagrams, code, etc.) How does it relate or build on existing work (provide acknowledgements or cite this work). You should report this in sufficient detail that anyone knowledgable with electronics etc would be able to reconstruct your implementation. Be sure to include a system diagram, annotated images, code, and a bill of materials.
Process: Draw from your weekly project logs to tell the story of your exploration. Describe how you arrived out the outcome. What iterations, refinements, design decisions and changes were made? What challenges were encountered and how did you resolve them?
Open Questions and Next Steps: What remains unresolved (in the concept, implementation or conversation around this outcome)? What are the things we should pay attention to for future explorations? What questions about ‘spookiness’ or everyday technology did this exploration raise or generate? What questions reamin to be addressed?
Reflection: Critically reflect on the success of this project. Were the aspirations and ambitions achieved. Was it received and encountere din the ways you wanted? If not, why not? What do you need to get there, etc?
Attribution and References: Reference any sources or materials used in the documentation or composition.

Each of these sections should be no more than 200 words max. and well illustrated (images, videos, etc.)

For the Project Info’s goal description: it must be tweetable - summarise your outcome in no more than 140 characters