Monday
On Monday I came into the office to laser cut some fabric bases and laser cut conductive fabric strips to iron on to the bases. I also laser cut a “hard” base for the LilyPad Arduino from a piece of balsa wood. I added magnets to the hard base to use for the connections. I also got started watching part of the participatory workshop videos. Mina and I are watching videos of the first and second session in which the older adults teach the researchers about their crafting and researchers teach older adults about the basics of electronics.
Hard Bases with Magnetic Connections
Soft Bases with Conductive Fabric
Tuesday
On Tuesday I went with my suitemates to watch the annual Bloomington Fourth of July parade. It was really fun (although it was a bit hot) and we saw lots of local Bloomington companies and other clubs. Afterwards I worked a bit more on watching the participatory design videos. It was interesting to see what people struggled with during the electronics exploration. The older adults were definitely interested in the electronics and asked where to purchase the materials frequently. However, they struggled sometimes with identifying different electronics or the proper port to plug each component into.
Wednesday
On Wednesday Mina and I worked on the reviewer response table. We are giving a brief one minute presentation about our research on Friday, so I worked on a draft of my talk with the slides. Mina and I also started working on our poster. I’m having a little difficulty finding a balance between words and graphics on the poster and tend to add more words than I should. Mina and I are thinking of ways to replace words with graphics or to emphasize certain words so there are no blocks of text.
Mina, Ben, and I met to discuss our progress on the videos, poster, paper, and other deliverables for the week/summer. Our original goal this summer was to assist with some of the participatory design workshops but recruitment has been slow. Mina and I may be able to assist with some workshop sessions towards week nine and week ten. Ben also gave us some pointers on our poser and gave us a good example to emulate. After meeting with Ben, I went to the Wednesday skills meeting. This week, the talk focused on funding graduate school and the process of applying to Indiana University.
After the skills meeting I tested some of the connections with the fabric bases and wooden bases that I made earlier in the week to make sure they were conductive. When I looked away for a second the conductive fabric strip attached to ground crossed with the conductive fabric strip attached to power and the strips started smoking. I will definitely have to account for this in my next iteration on my fabric bases and make sure that the wooden bases cannot short circuit.
Thursday
On Thursday Mina and Dr. Siek and I met first thing in the morning to order new materials for our toolkit and discuss our progress on some of the other deliverables for the week. After, I worked a bit more on the poster and replaced some of the text with graphics. Based on Ben and Dr. Siek’s feedback we decided to depict the results from the participatory design workshops with graphics signifying the main categories of objects participants wanted to create. Additionally, we decided to replace a background section with a visual depiction of other available toolkits in the field and how our kit fits in along this spectrum. Mina and I also worked to create a draft of our findings and discussion sections in our paper. In the afternoon Mina, Ben, and I met to do another session of affinity diagrams. We were relatively satisfied with the conclusion we came to. We decided there were two main categories of objects that participants were interested in creating, aesthetics and objects with a custom functionality.
After our session I went back to the prototyping lab to try another iteration of my bases. I decided I wanted the bases to have a specific shape to indicate input vs. output and the fabric bases to be color-coded. Square bases (both fabric and wood) indicate outputs and circle bases (both fabric and wood) indicate inputs. Wood bases are engraved with the name of the component and we ordered an iron on material to label the fabric bases. Fabric bases are color coded, teal indicates output, gray indicates input, and blue is the LilyPad Arduino.
Fabric and Wooden Bases