RECONNECT

Project  Leaders:  Claudio  Moderini;  Stefano  Cardini

Assistants:  Renzo  Gius?;  Sigrid  Wiederhecker

Author:  Mauro  D’Alessandro

Group  Members:  Jehee  Chun;  Lars  Rosengren

This document has been prepared as Project Report for the Master Course in I-Design according to the general brief with specific references to the brief of the project leader. This Project report also includes presentation and a body of work/sketches.

01.Abstract  /Ra?onale

This project focuses on a particular and very current kind of mania: The Information Addiction. We defined Information Addiction as the frequent onset of a highly standardized pattern of interaction with digital technologies. In particular we focused on people whos addiction brake the links between their passion and their real life. Our goal is to design a digital device able to interrupt the user’s addictive behaviour, bringing them back to their passions by the creation of random connection with people who share the same interests.

02.Introduc?on

Framework:

Information addiction is a main issue in our modern societies in wich information is provided as a continous and necessary flow through multiple channels. The general opinion is that our social lives highly depend on the quality and on the amount of information we access. In this framework many people begin to show the tendency to be addicted to digital information in reason of device’s portability (i.e. cellphones), or its infinite potential domain (i.e the web), and their actractive power (i.e. videogames). The main features of Information addiction are:

a) a huge amount of time spent using digital information devices (computers, cellphones, and with its peculiar aspects, also tv);

b) the onset of standardised behavioural patterns in the interactions with theese technologies (i.e. using always the same functions of a device, accessing the same websites in the same order at the same time…).

As our research clearly demonstrate, and as our personal experience can easily confirm, this phenomena is far more common than some year ago and is intended to spread again. Infact, as we observed, information addicted may belong to very different social area (businessmen who needs to be continously updated about work news, kids who can’t get rid of thei game consolle….), and they may hane developed their addiction for very different reason and toward different media.

The study of this target for the definition of our micro niche made us feel that we should have narrowed down towards a special kind of information addiction. So we focused on people who have a passion for some activity in life, but drift away from their passion as consequence of searching for information related to their passion, and instead develop an information addiction.

Objec&ves:

From the very first steps of the work, we resumed our attitude about excentic obsessive behaviour in this way: let’s try to help people not to hide their obsessions but using it in a way which should help them to improve their relationships with their excentric side. We tried to do it exploiting the potential of a ”ad hoc” social network , and exploiting some kind of surprising aspects able to break the automated relationship between our target and digital information devices.

We decided to take the direction of a wearable device which should on one hand monitor users activities during their digital interaction, connect to their pc and cellphone and to independently make some research about users passions. On the other hand be able to understand when there is an addictive interaction and to randomly attract user attention by suggesting him/her its research results, which as to be: a) local based b) able to connect user to people/events wich can reconnect the users to their original passion enhancing their experience .

03.Project  Descrip?on

Our research started from a wide brainstorming about some intresting and excentric manias on which focus the project. Afterwards we tried to analyse these obsessions using some significative dicotomies (i.e. social oriented/individual oriented manias; manias using a unique set of expressions/manias which are more understandable from outgroup members). This analysis was oriented to understand better the collected material, and at the same time to narrow down the amount of ideas coming from the brainstorming. What came out was a very focused categorisation of 4 main intrest areas: 1) escapism-role playing gaming; 2) subcultures based on body expressions; 3) social control fobias; 3) infornogfaphy-information adictions. After some session in wich each member went deep into one of these areas, we developed two main design solution. The first linked to the social control anxiety and the second linked to information addiction.

At least we came to a conclusion, and after making some further research about our current focus, we decided to norrow into this area towards a better definition of our micro niche.

Personally I consider this as the strong point of our project. We have been able to set very deep exploring discussion (sometimes caring less about other important aspects of the work), which gave us the possibility to have always a clear and common vision about the need to go deep into some problem setting aspect or, on the contrary, to make some step back for a further concept definition.

Once defined target and problem setting we began writing down some user profile and some scenario. Writing scenarios we can understand a lot of aspects of our problem which have n ever been analysed before, at this point

some more precise idea of functionalities and shapes was to come out. We have been defined our scenarios with some effort in the visual side, and at the same time we tried to draw a couple of diagrams describing the interactions.

We finally came to the current solution. At this point we stepped back to some shape benchmarking and to some research about technological specifications and materials, and also in this part of the work the process has been caracterised by a decise selection of the most appropriate solutions. The more we discussed about the shape, the more was clear that we needed to proceed by building a mock up, also to better specify the physical interface, the connections between the devices and between device and computer.

The result is a wearable device which has the shape of a bracelet. On the front side there are two displays: a small high definition TFT display, and a wider display caracterised by an e-paper interface with five buttons on the bottom side. Using a flexible material we explored several solution of physical use and wearability, and most of all we developed a very intresting system of connections between device belonging to differetn users, and a smart design solution for the individual use, based on the connection between the left side of the TFTdisplay and the right side of the buttons area.

The last part of the work was about the technological specifications for the device wifi connection, for the creation of a bluethooth network between devices and for the device’s preference managemet afrom the personal computer. These last steps completed our design process.

04.Conclusions

My feelings about this project are very positive. At a first glance the weak point should be the lack of functions and of web applications, but we consciously decided not to push on the functions aspects, and to give low level of device control to users.

By the way i think that with some more time, we should have done something better about the definition of the visual and haptic interface, that is a bit less focused comparing, for example, to the functional aspects of the device that come from a very good concept definition and for this reason are the strong point of the work.

I believe that this project should have intresting development because, even if is focused on a micro group of people it should be attractive for a wider group of people whose habits in relationship with information technologies are somehow ”borderline”. It would be very stimulating to explore the possible links between this two cathegories of people, and study how they can influence each other in reason of their different relation with the same passion.

05.References

Wikipedia, Last updated: 1 January 2008, Accessed: March 5, 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infornography Wikipedia, Last updated: 17 December 2007, Accessed: March 5, 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_addiction

IEEE Spectrum magazine, Lucky Robert W., Last updated: September 1999, Accessed: March 5, 2008 http://www.boblucky.com/reflect/sept99.htmNew Scientist, Turkle Liz Else Sherry, Last updated: 20 September 2006, Accessed: March 5, 2008 http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19125691.600New York Times, Richtel Matt, Last updated: 6 July 2003, Accessed: March 5, 2008 The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive? - New York TimesTechnology Review, Naone Erica, Last updated: 7 February 2007, Accessed: March 5, 2008 http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/17628/

Noso, Last updated: 6 July 2003, Accessed: March 3, 2008 http://nosoproject.com/

E Ink Corporation, Last updated: February 2007, Accessed: March 5, 2008 http://www.eink.com/technology/flexible.htmlGreen Hank (Ecogeek.org), Last updated: 22 March 2007 Accessed: March 5, 2008 http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/500/PC World, Williams Martyn, IDG News Service, Last updated: 3 January 2008 Accessed: March 5, 2008 http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,140959/printable.htmlPolymer Vision, Last updated: n.d. Accessed: March 3, 2008 http://www.polymervision.com/frameset.php?id=&page=Technology Review, Talbot David, Last updated: Feburary 2008 Accessed: March 5, 2008 https://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/19851/

Gizmodo.com, White, Charlie, Last updated: 3 October 2007 Accessed: March 5, 2008 http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/design-concept/unique-cellphone-techno+demoed-at-ceatec-2007-306718.phpSplashpower, Last updated: n.d. Accessed: March 5, 2008 http://www.splashpower.com/HomeWikipedia, Last updated: 4 March 2008, Accessed: March 5, 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Field_Communication