Grow and shrink! Signs

Signage on my pieces: 

Sign (will be propped up like a mini science fair board on the side)

Love to hear your thoughts/ suggestions!

Final Photos of Make Your Own Cityscape

In the end, I decided on a simple light with filters!

Also, Sebastian and Alice inspired me to add in dinosaurs and a horse.

Main setup (With labels):

The filters roughly emulates camera aperture, and you can see the shadows get sharper as the filter holes get smaller. However, the area and intensity of light also goes down.

Plasma Speaker

I was super excited to get to show my prototypes on the floor of the exploratorium last Friday. The main exhibit I worked on and brought in was my 'Plasma Speaker' prototype. I also showed the platform with lasers and acrylic shapes, which I titled 'Laser Island'.

For the plasma speaker, I didn't quite get the physical unit built up to the level that I would have liked beforehand, and as a result I had to sit next to the exhibit the whole time to make sure people didn't shock themselves. All of the high voltage connections were insulated, but there were still loose wires showing and the terminals of the 12V batteries were exposed, so my presence was required and my attention had to be focused primarily on any possible dangers rather than the interaction. I would have liked to back off a bit and just observe how people approach and interact with the piece, but being right there to answer questions and hear any initial comments was nice too.

Since we showed on one day, we had to split up into pre and post lunch showings. The morning was filled with field trip groups of mostly school children with some adult supervision. The afternoon was much more relaxed in general and consisted of smaller groups and families with younger children.

The bigger rush in the morning meant that there was a constant flow of mostly children next to the plasma speaker. The kids were great! They were interested, engaged, and asked questions about how the arc worked and how it made sound. This gave me a great opportunity to explain things in simple terms compared to the more technical details I tend to get into when speaking with Stanford engineering students. In the few moments when one of the adults came over without the kids, I was able to practice my explanation of the effect to them also and judge by their reaction how technical I should be.

My electronics were not sounding very clean, and a static noise started showing up and covering most of the music playing through the speaker. I thought this would be a bad thing, but there were some pleasant unexpected results. For example, when the arc gap was increased beyond a distance that the arc could sustain itself, there was a really interesting lightning effect. This doesn't happen when there is no sound, and the static noise made the effect much more pronounced than with any music source I've tried so far.

In the final piece, I may not want to allow the gap to increase to a size that allows this. I think it is an interesting state of the arc, but it may be a distraction from the regular mode of the singing plasma arc.

In the afternoon, the smaller group and family dynamic changed how people approached and interacted. The initial approach was usually made by a parent, and then they would call attention to the children. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes the kids were just distracted by the giant mirror exhibit within view.

After having the chance to reflect on the day, I've thought of a number of changes to make for the next version.

In the electronics, I tried to build a second circuit on the breadboard and I think there was interference either from that or from spikes in the power supply rails coupling with oscillations in the input stage, causing some feedback that caused the static noise. I also was having issues with controlling my phone anytime I plugged it in, so I'm going to add an input amplifier/buffer circuit to isolate the sound source from any high voltage or high frequency feedback.

The arc was much weaker at the end of the day compared to the beginning, which tells me that my batteries aren't lasting as long as I'd like. I'm ordering a 36V power supply to try to replace the batteries with something more consistent over time.

For safety issues, I need to build a box that more fully encloses the electronics and the power supply. I may also need to alter the geometry of the cover because there is a lot of heat coming out of the top all directed towards an area that is easily within arms reach.

I don't think anyone had any problem believing that the sound was coming from the arc, so the transparency of the device was pretty good. I'll just have to make sure I don't make it worse when building up the enclosure.

For the handle, I'd like to build in some adjustable hard stops so I can control the range of the moving electrode and keep it within a distance that doesn't get too far away from the optimal sustainable arc range. If the limit does extend out into the 'lightning zone', I'll attempt to add some springs to bias it back after the handle is released.

Triple Shadow

Building challenges

My major goals in improving on my previous prototype were:

• Increasing the scale of the exhibit. When I tested the previous prototype, most people told me they wanted the experience to be more immersive.
• Improving interactivity. Letting users manipulate the shape that casts the shadow could make it easier for them to explore the phenomenon.
• Making the piece more surprising. A couple of testers also mentioned that more 'surprising' shapes would make the overall experience cooler.

Given these goals, I made a couple of major changes to bring this piece to where I wanted it to be: 

• Doubled scale. This was a substantial logistical challenge, as you can probably imagine. I ended up attaching the sides together using brackets, which worked really well.
• Additional shapes. These were pretty easy to make, and I've got at least one more in the works for this week. The letters-object needed to be made out of layers of foam core because it has complex internal geometry, but I made the other one out of pink foam, which was pretty easy and worked really well. I also attached the shapes to dowels so that users could hold them up in the light themselves.
• A shroud to hide the shape. I built three intersecting tunnels ("the box"), which served the dual purpose of holding the lights and hiding the shape from view when casting shadows. (More on that later, too.) The major issue with this part was securing the box to the backdrop-- it was fairly heavy on its own, so it stayed in place but was susceptible to tipping over. This was an issue I wasn't really able to resolve before the piece went on the floor.

Label

"Hold the object in between the three lights. What shapes do you see?"

Observations on usage

Social character of the exhibit. I noticed a couple of typical dyadic interactions with the piece, which I'll describe as parent-child, child-child, and adult-adult.

A common parent-child dyad might interact with the exhibit as follows: the parent hands the child the dowel ("This is the object, Hannah."), reads the label to their child, then guides them to hold the object under the vertical light. Then, they ask the child to tell them what shape is being cast as a shadow onto the bottom face of the exhibit backdrop ("See shapes? Cool, huh?"). The child usually gives a plausible answer that the parent immediately reinforces ("A square." "That's right, a square."; "I think I know how to make a C"). Once this goal is achieved, the parent moves the child on to the next exhibit. The other typical parent-child dyadic interaction I observed was a bit briefer-- some parents discouraged their children from exploring the exhibit ("This might be for older kids."; "You're gonna break this."; "Let go, Aidan.") and hurried them along to the next thing.




A common child-child dyad (or a larger group of children) would pick up the dowels, and either begin swinging them around or examining the shape at the end of the dowel. These groups seemed less likely to hold the objects under the shadow. By contrast, adult-adult dyads (although I only observed a couple) were more likely to figure out the interaction in its entirety ("You've got to put it up here. You can make three shadows." "Oh you got it, good job!").

AIl in all, I'm not too worried about the child-child or adult-adult interactions-- but the parent-child interactions could have used work. In general, I found that the parents were reinforcing the first interpretation the children came up with. Since the interaction I planned for was not particularly intuitive, but possible through extended interaction, this was a substantial obstacle to getting the children to see the phenomenon in its entirety.

Interaction issues. The majority of users did not interact with the piece in the way I originally intended. Most commonly, they placed the object under the vertical light and examined the shadow underneath it. Only one user initiated the ideal interaction, and it took him a nontrivial amount of time to figure it out ("In between the lights? What does that mean?"). However, when he got it, he seemed pleased and intrigued by the phenomenon ("<laughs> That's cool.").

There were also a couple of users who never even made it to the dowels-- one particular visitor tried looking in the backs of the LEDs, and left after doing so. It was pretty apparent that height was a major factor, too. Most of the kids could only see the bottom shadow, since the shadows cast on the wall were obscured by the box holding the lights.

Finally, quite a few users only saw a square when they held up the object to the light, and stated "a square" (as if in response to the label) before moving on.

Changes for the next exhibition

I've planned a few changes to the exhibit as it currently stands:

Remove the box. I think hiding the shape makes the interaction undesirably complex. It may be easier for users to hold the object between the shadows if their path to holding the object is unobstructed.

Add an orienting handle to the dowels. Users were unlikely to orient the object in the way I wanted-- a handle that orients the object somehow will make it easier for the desired shadows to show up immediately.

Set up the exhibit at a lower height. Some kids were too short to really see the bottom shadow from a good angle.

Change the label. A lot of people spoke about their interaction with the exhibit as if in response to the label's question ("What shapes do you see?"), but were uncertain about what it meant to "hold the objects in between the three lights." I'm going to run with this and see if there are more informative labels that might work better.

The week 8 prototype

At the end of last week, my goal was to finally put together the electronics and come up with an exhibit that could be tested on the floor. While the main goal of this consisted of adding the electronic components, there were several piece of the exhibit I wanted to refine.

The Week 7 Prototype

By the end of Week 7 I had a prototype that was pretty exciting.  I just couldn't get it to work on its own yet.  I had changed the exhibit around so that the wax flowed over the sides of three layers of terraces.  While I had tried using mirrors and other methods to make the wax more viewable to the user, this method seemed best.

Prototypes working toward the week 7 model

While this worked, I wanted to play with the shape of the terraces and angle at which they were slanted. After looking at a wide variety of shapes and testing them out of paper, I decided on an organic shape that reminded me waterfalls that I've seen.  I also spent time texting which angle would be best for the wax.  I then used the power nibbler to cut out the terraces, which needed to be metal so that at the end of the day they could be heated to melt the remaining wax.

After building and attaching the terraces to a stand, my next challenge was preparing the circuit and making the pieces that would melt the wax.  Testing out several prototypes in plastic and wax, I settled on a design made out of sheet metal that I felt would best melt wax and allow it to flow out onto the terraces. While making wax melters that were functional was important, these pieces of metal that would rise to very high temperatures also needed to be safe, so I attached wooden tops to each such that they would prevent direct contact with the metal through a wooden barrier.

Sketches of possible designs

A plastic prototype 

The final wax melters 

The last piece was to create an electronic circuit using resistive wiring that would heat the metal.  While I initially had no idea how to approach this, one of the TAs showed me that the pink foam cutter in Room 36 operated using nichrome wiring and had a homemade circuit that I could copy, which was my goal.  Once I had all the parts in hand, I tested out the circuit with the wiring which was largely successful as it generated enough heat to start melting the plastic on the alligator clips I was using.  

While the circuit worked well on its own, there were several instances I hadn't accounted for.  First of all, I realized that connected the wiring to the melters was more difficult that I initially thought, a mistake that I will fix in my next phase of prototyping.  On the other hand, I failed to account for the load in the nichrome wiring.  While I had copied the circuit almost exactly from the pink foam cutter, I never measured the resistance across the wire, so when I ran the current across the circuit I built, within a few minutes the transformer heated up and was blown out.  Moving forward, I plan to troubleshoot further and make certain that the heating element has an appropriate resistance such that I do not blow another transformer.  I hope to fix both this and the melter by the coming Friday.

As a result, my piece was unable to be put on the floor for user testing.  Nonetheless, I had the chance to look at my classmates exhibits and how the visitors interacted with them.  Dan's electric radio was by far the closest to mine and gave plenty of insight.  With such a dangerous phenomenon, he placed a plastic case around the electric charge, something I plan to do with my exhibit.  While this did put a wall between the visitor and the phenomenon, he put the exhibit at the edge of the table so visitors could get as close as possible, which they did with eagerness, something else I plan to take into account for my final prototype.

Something else among the many other things that I noticed during my time at watching visitors play with others' exhibits was the importance of draw and placement in the museum.  For example, the darker parts of the room were much less often frequented than the lighter parts.  Even with Clementine's exhibit which displayed a bright and fun mirror box, visitors were much more likely to play with the exhibits in the lighter parts of the room and that were closer to the entrance such as Winnie's, Emily's, Dan's, and others.  For me, this underscores how important having a light setup is to my final piece.  However, for next Friday my goal is functionality.

Design a Drawing Machine

I named my exhibit prototype "Design a Drawing Machine" because I wanted the title to evoke the fact that the user is actively engaged in building the machine by selecting which gears and types of arms.

Challenges of Prototype Creation:

I made a lot of changes from my last prototype to this first iteration on the exhibit floor. One of my primary focuses was on enhancing user experience: color coding gears by even/odd/prime, sliding magnets, a way to color code and match up the handle/knob to the dowel, and more (thinking of affordances from the Exploratorium article we read.) Changes I made included:

• Neodymium magnets and rubber band tension system: I designed an easy way to add and remove different sized gears by sliding the center dowels. The original challenge was that weding in the wooden dowels took too much effort and precision and was not at all intuitive or easy for the user. (This magnet band set-up took a lot of tricky tinkering and testing to set up, and still, I found out through testing on Friday that this needs to be improved)
• Better construction of the harmonogram base, including a handle for the left hand to grip and exert downward pressure with (U-bolt)
• Additional progress: color-coding and labeling gears based on # of teeth: blue is even, gray is odd, orange is prime.
• Constructing 5 different arm types (scissor, single, uneven lengths, long, short)
• A stand to carry the removable and exchangeable parts

A problem I still had after I finished the prototype was slippage: because the rubber band magnet system only exerts the right pressure when certain gear sizes are paired up, often the gears would slip over each other, or slip away so that contact is lost. While I solved the problem of easily switching out gears by creating a new mechanism for doing so, I created a new problem in the process, which was gear slippage. I tried to mitigate this issue by adding a sign and label that suggested gear ratios / gear sizes for the exhibit user to test out. These gear pairings were selected so that it would stretch the rubber bands just the right amount to hold everything tightly in place without creating too much slippage pressure. Of course, I later learned that no one reads signs.

Experience on the Exploratorium floor:

I had a very illuminating experience on the Exploratorium floor. My most pleasant surprise was the kids were actively engaged in the harmonograms and spent a few minutes with the exhibit; there were many people who spent over 5 minutes tinkering with the same drawing machine. Knowing that most people spend less than a minute at a given exhibit, I was pleasantly surprised. I think the drawing aspect of the exhibit makes it hands-on and engaging for the kids. 

I was also happy with the parental interaction with kids. Often times the parents did a great job of encouraging the child to use the machine correctly "Look, there's a 'turn this' label on this handle. You should turn here." But several times the parents themselves also didn't quite get the interaction correct in terms of which hand goes where and how to set up the machine. I think this was my fault as the designer not putting sufficient cues or diagrams to help. 

I was also very pleasantly surprised by the collaboration between kids. I heard one kid tell the other, "If you have a bigger gear it helps" or "Put that gear here." Even though these kids were elementary school students, they were still thinking critically and helping each other out.

"Pile on all the things!" I noted that none of the kids under middle school level set-up the machine correctly; I realized kids have a tendency to want to pile on as many things as possible onto a machine, when given spare parts to choose from, in this case, gears and arms. Of course, these machines didn't draw the curves, let alone budge at all. However, I noticed kids were happy just to have drawn some scribbles on paper. It seems kids like 2 things: making marks (with pen, pencil) and chaos.

Other problems I noted:

• Gear slippage when too much pressure was put in turning the gears. Usually kids would react to this gear slippage by cranking it even harder. This, of course, does not help.
• The other visitors were more calm and steady, but there was still gear slippage from time to time. More often than not they were still applying too much pressure.
• Girls were more patient.
• Older visitors are more patient. When one of the kids patiently set up the machine and made it work, I deliberately asked for his age: 8th grade.
• People didn't know how to hold the machine. Many people tried turning it with both hands when in fact 1 hand was easier. Some would hold no handles. I should make the affordances better for this aka make 1 handle look like a knob and the other one shorter
• People didn't set up the arms correctly. They would set the arms in the enter dowel, which of course doesn't move the arm at all. I should have a diagram to help guide users.
• No one reads signs
• No one reads labels. Even the labels that were directly on the machines were ignored such as "Turn this" or "hold here." Sometimes the parents would notice that let the kid know, but more often that not they were completely overlooked.
• Because of the abundance of gears and arms to switch out (many degrees of freedom) I noticed that the users were spending a lot of time playing with gears, and not much time actually cranking the machine to produce the end resulting curve. In my next iteration I might want to have less variability and less chaos.
• A lot of users benefited from seeing someone else do it correctly first so at several points during the afternoon I would pretend to use one of the machines as if another Exploratorium visitor, and since there were 2 harmonograms, I hoped others would step in and try to mimic my motions

Many many many scribbles and the result of a kid putting 3 arms on 1 harmonogram

I think a lot of my experiences reflected what Alice said about how "people are not as intelligent as you think." For instance, they would continue to turn the gear even after the gears had slipped and it was clear the turning had no effect. But perhaps I should give them credit and say instead, "people are not me." As the creator, I know where to put the arms, which knobs to hold, and exactly what pressure I should crank the gears so that it doesn't cause them to slip.

Visitors' interactions with classmates' exhibits:

What I noticed for most of the exhibits is that kids like swarming. They swarm around an exhibit 5-7 kids at a time, which results in interesting side-effects, such as in Winnie's case, kids sometimes blocking the light source. Kids also love using exhibits in an unintended, often dangerous way, as I noticed when they picked up the lasers from Dan's exhibit and started pointing them at each other's faces. 

Changes and improvements based on my experience on the floor:

My plan for the final iteration is twofold:

• First, I want to redesign the machine so that instead of slots and sliding magnets, I have discrete holes that securely hold the rod in place. Instead of 3 moveable gears, I will have the center gear set in place, since that one is just to move the other 2 gears in a ratio and its own size has no significance. This way, with 1 gear anchored, it is easy to create discrete, tight fitting holes for the other gear sizes on either end. I hope this will solve the problem of gear slippage and simply make it more intuitive to use.
• Next, I want to improve affordances by making handles were necessary and color coordinating where each item goes (ie. match the yellow-marked rod with the yellow hole.) I will also have a large diagram of what the final set-up looks like, and what a user looks like when cranking the machine (like the "magic want" diagram)

The beginning

The aftermath

The Geometry of the Infinite

-Write about the challenges you encountered when you were making this prototype. Write about problems you couldn't solve while building this prototype, write about issues that you were able to solve and the progress you made.

The first challenge I encountered was that the guide rail on the band saw in Room 36 was too small to cut a 12 inch square. I tried going to the wood shop and the metal lab, but those band saws also did not have enough clearance for my piece which was 24"*36". Eventually, I decided to modify my design to make the cuts feasible.

I also had issues with the switch that controlled the lights in the box, as the PRL was all out. I had to make do by reusing the switch from my earlier project. The LEDs I selected also were not ideal, and need to be changed if I pursue this direction.

-Write about your experience on the Exploratorium floor. What did you observe? In what ways did the users' interactions with your piece correspond to your expectations, and in what ways did they not?

I really enjoyed getting a chance to watch users interact with the exhibits on the floor. I observed many points of the interaction that needed to be modified in my piece. 

People did not know where to look. After reading the instructions, people did not know what to do with the light source, and where they were supposed to look. A lot of people also peered into the box from afar, which also seemed counter intuitive to me but I need to fix.

These guys kind of just looked in from afar, I need to make it more obvious that one needs to be close to experience it.

This young boy pulled the rod out from below the stand and put it where I intended the user to look. He seemed to have a good time though. 

Some other key observations:

People also seemed to have a hard time with the rod mechanism

The entire exhibit would slide back along the table when groups of people interacted with it.

The stick would bump into the legs of the stand restricting motion.

It was too tall for some kids.

The unappealing nature of the exterior of the box did not attract visitors.

Some kids fogged up the inside of the box if they got too close to the box.

Kids' internal monologues are almost never internal

Kids recognized it was an iPhone and started switching pictures even though there was no mention of that in my instructions

People's reaction to the piece varied, but was on the whole very positive. I liked seeing the delighted reactions of the kids when they looked in. I need to consider how to make a longer interaction, 

-Write about anything interesting you may have noticed regarding the visitors' interactions with any of your classmates' exhibits.

The younger audience really enjoyed playing with Winnie's cityscape. It was very interactive and groups of children could use it at the same time. They also seemed to enjoy knocking the pieces down.

Kids loved the buttons on Clementine's exhibit. I wonder if there is a way to play up that aspect of the interaction. Maybe have one button cause a drastic shift in lights or something.

People seemed to have a hard time finding the correct place to put the object in Alex's shadow exhibit.

All the laser exhibits involved kids pointing lasers into eyes.

-Write about any other changes that you think would improve the piece based on your experience on the floor. Changes could be informed by your observation of visitor interaction, seeing your piece in the museum environment, seeing your piece in a certain light condition, on a certain table.
-tell us which of the above changes you would like to make by friday

Firstly, I am considering getting rid of the LEDs. The did not add any meaningful interaction, and usually ended up confusing the users.

I need to make the stand more robust, so that I does not slide around on the table as much.

I would also like to try lighting the entire panel below the box. Some feedback I received from the Exploratorium staff was the interaction felt very removed using the stick and handle. I am thinking of ways how I might be able to make this interaction feel more personal. Perhaps if the users user their arms instead of the stick. I am also thinking of ways to increase user input on the shapes. Many people lamented the inability of increasing the length of the rectangle on the iphone.

Although this would be a big change, I hope to make the exterior of the box look presentable. Perhaps creating a wood frame. Also better lighting to make the sign more present and to dict people's attention the exhibit.

Some pictures of people interacting with the exhibit.

Build Your Own Cityscape

That was definitely a somewhat unexpected and very amusing experience,
and it was very interesting to see the contrast between the morning and afternoon groups.

While the kids in the morning were very enthusiastic, I feel like they didn't pay that much attention to the shadows  in their interaction with my piece, and were occasionally more involved in throwing/stacking/playing dominoes with the buildings. It was great to see them have fun, but I feel like I could probably make some changes to the prototype to enable a slightly more restrained experience, such as reshaping the buildings to make them less homogenous and stackable.  Also, it was interesting to see that almost none of them read the whiteboard descriptions, and collectively they actually managed to accidentally wipe the whole slate clean.

Photo from John's camera

On the other hand, for the families that came in the afternoon, most were moving at a less chaotic pace, and actually had time to play with the "shadows" instead of the buildings. Most of them would fiddle around with the buildings a bit, then read the whiteboard, and then try to observe the pinhole effect.

(On that note, I remember hearing someone say at dinner that "people aren't as smart as you'd expect"; there were quite a few people who left after failing to see the effect, because when they moved a building closer to the light, there were still multiple buildings blocking out all the light in the front. Next time, the instructions should probably be a bit more explicit.)

I also noticed at least 3 separate groups that sat down, and had parents explaining the color separation effect to their children. A completely unintended but nice result of having the sofa instead of a stool, was that I think the parents were slightly less impatient...

But one thing I noticed was that more often than not the parents would actually hurry the children along, and force them to leave in the midst of exploration. This was somewhat surprising and not entirely pleasant to watch.

The biggest challenge I had in developing was probably the light source, or more generally the direction I should take with the light and shadows component. I tried fairly hard to achieve an actual reversed image pinhole effect (I really wanted to be able to have the windows "change shape") but in the end as John pointed out I couldn't have both that and the element of scaling. Later on there were a few other light sources that proved to be less-than-ideal, and a mishap that involved me buying a set of light bulbs with a weird incompatible socket..

I'm partly satisfied with the light source I have now, but it's still somewhat of a compromise, because the colors while on one hand contribute to the pinhole effect, also contribute to distractiveness and blurriness. I think I will have to try a few more light sources before friday.

Another thing that Alex pointed out when we were observing the morning session kids was that it'd be cool to have landmarks or iconic buildings dispersed through the regular shaped buildings. While originally I was hesitant about making different shapes because they'd take away from the rescaling factor, after hearing conversations of kids where they'd exclaim "This is New York!" "No, it's San Francisco!", I think that would be something they'd enjoy. I could probably still preserve the rescaling factor by making the shapes incorrectly scaled, and this would also hopefully prevent the games of domino. So this is something I'd be working on this week.

Can You Make Glasses Sing?

Challenges in making this prototype:

One of my biggest challenges in building the prototype for this past Friday was fastening the glasses to the display. It was extremely critical to make sure the glasses were well-attached to the board because I saw that as the best way of minimizing danger potential for my exhibit. I deliberated for a long time as to how to do accomplish this because I wanted the method of fastening to not take away from the "glass-ness" of the glasses--by that I mean I didn't want it to keep them from looking like everyday kitchen objects, so the fasteners had to be non-obtrusive and couldn't obscure big parts of the glasses. I ended up opting for rubber washers upon Dan's suggestion (thanks Dan!) and wood screws, four sets per glass. Worked well! I ran into a conflict when we were setting up at the Exploratorium, however, as one of the glasses actually shattered as I was screwing in the one adjacent to it. Lesson: bring extra glasses.

I would say the other big challenge was making the turntable for the spinning glass. This mechanism ended up being much more complex than I had anticipated--it included a motor which plugged into a mysterious black box (adapter? transformer? I'm electronically clueless) and subsequently into the wall, as well as a wood block which served as casing and support for the motor, plus laser-cut Duron circles which fit onto the spinning tip of the motor and acted as the actual turntable. This was the final design in a series of many which I tried and failed with, primarily because I was trying to glue the small base of the motor to anything and everything to stabilize it when adhesives like hot glue and superglue just aren't that effective on plastic. When the motor wasn't stably attached to a base, it would wobble as it spun, subsequently causing the table to wobble much more. I finally figured out that if I drilled a hole into a block of wood, the upper lip of the motor with a slightly larger diameter would be able to keep the motor suspended, thus also preventing the wires from being crushed beneath it.

Unfortunately, I still didn't find that this turning mechanism made users have an easier time so I don't know if I will include it again in next week's iteration. More on that later.

At the Exploratorium:

Oh goodness. What an experience. I like to think as a PD kid that I know all about user testing, but I realize now that my experience user testing has been sheltered to say the least. I usually have the luxury of testing things with highly intelligent young adults, so I was very unprepared for the storm of rambunctious field trip kids that came in with the first time slot on Friday.

First and foremost, I realized that this prototype is just downright unsafe as is. I need to add some form of protective casing, period. I was terrified watching kids grab the glasses and try to move them around, so even if we're designing for a somewhat older and less energetic audience I know that I'll never feel comfortable with this exhibit on the floor unless I remove the impending danger of broken glass on little fingers.

The first group's interaction with my prototype were very unexpected to me. I realized that since I've been testing this on college students until now, I've come to expect the interactions of someone who ALREADY KNOWS that glasses can "sing." College students will persist until they succeed--kids with a thousand other competing stimuli will get bored almost immediately and move on. This was disappointing to me because I wanted them to have the satisfaction of a successful experience. Kids were much more excited by the pipette to add and remove water, which was hilarious to me because that element was added to the exhibit almost as an afterthought. Some kids spent several minutes moving water around between the glasses and entirely missed the point.

I soon realized that I needed to step in and somehow demonstrate the possibilities, because kids weren't understanding what the exhibit was for (and obviously not reading the label... should have seen that one coming). When I would occasionally make a glass "sing" myself, however, kids would definitely get excited. However, it didn't make the experience any easier for them. I was also disappointed to see that the motorized spinning glass didn't help. First of all, kids were almost always unable to figure out the right amount of pressure to apply without extensive coaching. Second of all, it seemed that none of them made the connection between the spinning glass and the stationary one--even if they did figure out they were supposed to place their finger on the rim of the spinning glass, that somehow didn't translate to rubbing the rims of stationary glasses in a circular motion. 

All these developments were very disheartening. Luckily, the second session restored my hope. The difference between energy and dynamic was like night and day. In particular, I noticed that while exhibits that incorporated light and color, like Winnie's were extremely popular during the first rotation, but received less attention than other exhibits during the second. I was finally graced by users who actually read the label, and who often spent significant time trying out the different glasses and getting them to sing. Seeing users finally have successful experiences was a truly awesome feeling and, dare I say, even made the trauma of the morning worthwhile.

Changes:

After much deliberation, I have decided not to include a motorized glass in my next prototype. I think I could improve the functionality of the turntable if I wanted to (stronger motor, etc.) but I wasn't convinced after last week that it was any easier for users to have a successful experience that way than with a stationary glass--if anything, they would be put off because inability to succeed on the "easy version" means probable failure on more "difficult versions." I think it's better for all the glasses to be presented as the same "difficulty" so that users don't get put off if they fail with one or another.

I also know that I need casing for the glasses. I plan on making this out of clear acrylic. It will take the form of a box around the glasses in their current configuration. I will put the glasses on pieces of wood so that their rims all are the same height from the board, and laser cut into the lid of the box the shapes of the rims in their appropriate positions. That way, users can rub the rims but not touch the rest of the glass, preventing danger (also, if the glass does somehow break, it will fall into the box and not onto a user).

I would also like to add graphics that make it more obvious to the user how they're supposed to interact with the exhibit. This means an actual graphic showing a user and the glasses, but also I'd like to include arrows and minimal text on the top of the acrylic casing to indicate that the users should rub the rim with their fingers.



It's already been said, but it was an exhausting and rewarding day. Enjoyed spending it with you guys :)