Data Experience

DATA EXPERIENCE Ross McIntosh

DATA EXPERIENCE

In an information saturated world, how do we make data meaningful and delightful?

Type: Duration: Core Staff: Group Members:

Group Research/Individual Outcomes 6 weeks Janet Kelly, Bob McCaffery, Brian Dixon and Brian Loranger Diane Hammerton Luisa Felappi Ross McIntosh

Introduction

In this project, we were being asked to investigate how data could be incorporated into designed experiences.

From conducting auto-ethnographic research, we were to develop an understanding of ‘data’ as a material and how it can be generated from individuals as part of their daily lives. With this in mind, we are to design a way in which data can be delightful as well as purposeful value directly to the individual that generates the data.

We are to design an overall system with physical touchpoints that collect raw data and then delivers the processed information to the user.

We are then to consider the ethics of data collection and usage. A contentious and complex issue from which we are to construct a statement on how data should be used within society.

Contents

4//Initial Research 6//Ethnographic Research 9//Design Direction 10//Infographics Workshop 14//Concept Development 15//System Development 16//Model Development 17//Brand Development 23//Video Development 27//Ethical Statement 29//Presentation 31//Reflection

4

Initial Research

After being briefed for the project, we conducted desktop research as a class into what kind of data can be generated about individuals. We then brainstormed as a class to identify topics of interest.

After being briefed on the project, we were split into groups and conducted desktop research as a class into what kind of data can be generated by individuals as part of their daily lives. In groups we discussed what data we could utilise in order to create meaningful experiences.

Undertaking this research was difficult because so many aspects of daily life can generate data and it was difficult to choose which topic to go forward with. In the group, we had very different ideas about which area to research, the others wanted to start with a simple mundane topic and expand as they go, whilst I wanted to choose a more obscure area as this would open the scope for innovation and new user experiences.

Once we had created a bank of ideas to present, as a class we then discussed our topic ideas in full as a brainstorm; from which we were given suggestions by tutors and peers as to which area we should investigate. This exercise was useful to see everyone’s perception of data in the broad sense but it was evident that many groups ideas were similar and the tutors had to differentiate each groups area of focus.

This was an arduous process but by having a class critique of our ideas and tutor suggestions, we quickly narrowed down our ideas and focus on “Home Energy Interactions” as our theme for the this project and to begin researching in greater depth going forward.

When we had been assigned our topic for research, as a group we divided up to undertake some primary research to explore the theme further. Through use of informed speculation, we identified a range of design drivers during the initial topic brainstorm, by undertaking our own initial primary research at home, we got a scope about what energy interactions are actually generated in a domestic environment.

Having such a broad and interconnected theme at this stage was perplexing and I quickly wanted to narrow down to a specific interaction or con-

sequence that users experience within a domestic environment, so I focused on switches and sockets.

Through some auto-ethnographic research, I analysed my own home and mapped out the energy touchpoints and gauged how much energy these touchpoints draw throughout the day. It was surprising to study how much energy we do use, especially when considering the house as a whole.

We are often only conscious of energy in one room at a time and oblivious to energy interactions and wastage elsewhere in the home. I collated my data to share and compare results with the group.

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Ethnographic Research Collating research undertaken into how users generate data during day-to-day life in their domestic environment From collating our own field research, we quickly realised that energy was a very ubiquitous term within a domestic environment and has a very complex structure to identify the inputs and output sources of energy in the home and the boundaries of how we interact with it.

We sought to map our auto-ethnographic data we collated and create some focus questions to delve further into our research. Narrowing our focus meant we were more decisive as to what kind of data we were looking to ensure validity and accuracy when collecting user information.

FOCUS QUESTIONS

How do I interact with my home?

How does interaction vary over time?

How does interaction vary logistically?

Mapping our research required lots of planning and discussion to agree on the format and focus of enquiry.

We analysed out auto ethnographic research in detail and affinitised our results to find insights and opportunities to develop further. We focused on the types of energy that users directly interact with to ensure we can correlate our findings and graphed our interactions across a peak period of home usage to discover valuable usage data and information.

Discussing and reviewing the auto-ethnographic data we collated.

As a group we decided to create a survey for other users to share more information about how they interact with energy in their home. By collating more data, we hoped to prove our data as an accurate representation of user energy interactions within the home.

SURVEY RESULTS What room do you think consumes the most energy in your home?

How aware would you say you are to energy consumption in your home?

How many sockets do you have switched on at peak times during the day?

Design Direction

Collating and analysing our research and dividing off into individual areas of interest to develop and deliver outcomes After conducting our research, we were to make a presentation about what we have discovered during our research process and present our findings. Our key insights as a group focused on user’s perception of energy. User’s awareness of energy consumption was mainly reliant to where they spend there time. This means that users can waste energy due to lack of awareness of energy interactions elsewhere in the home. With this in mind, a key opportunity was to inform user’s of their holistic energy use and where in the home energy is being used at any given time. This would help towards user’s attitudes interacting with energy in the home

and encourage them to be more considerate and compassionate towards their home.

Another key design driver was the kind of interaction we currently have with energy. Current inputs such as switches and sockets don’t offer a meaningful response to the user who interacts with them. If the touchpoint could communicate semantically or emotionally towards the user, then the user’s relationship with energy in the home could change as they gain more of an insight as to how the home feels. This personification of the home would be an interesting area to explore as it could create very powerful and emotive experiences between user and home.

AWARENESS OF ENERGY USE

SEMANTIC TOUCHPOINTS

EMOTIVE RESPONSE

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10

Infographics

Workshop with Brian Dixon to develop graphical communication skills when displaying and presenting processed data During this project, we had a mini-workshop hosted by Brian Dixon that was to help us to analyse and visually communicate our research and concepts. An Infographics expert, Brian started the 3 day workshop with a ‘show and tell’ of what we consider to be an effective infographic. This exercise made me look more closely at what comprised an infographic and what made it effective. From researching and sourcing potential infographics, I noticed that the more graphical the interface, the better it was to interpret. Many of my graphics have previously been very text heavy whereas, during this task, I realised how my work can be more interpretive and enticing by striping back text and

substituting for graphics and icons. This made the infographics I was sourcing more interesting to explore and made me use my imagination and interpretation more about what certain elements convey and semantically suggest to the user.

As a class, we all discussed each others chosen infographic and this helped ease our minds into thinking about what makes a successful infographic. We were also given a short lecture on the primary elements to which make effective graphic design.

After we were given an overview of infographics, we were set the task of creating and presenting our own at the end of the workshop to put the theories learned into practise.

I wanted to draw all the elements of the design opportunities defined by my research and create a holistic proposition that will be the starting point of my data experience. From my insights before, I wanted to make an artefact that communicated to the user how much energy is being used around the home at any given time in a meaningful way.

The infographic would be the visual output from the device, where the offending appliance or room will be displayed and the user can then tackle the energy problem directly. Over time I envisioned this service teaching the user to treat the home with respect and build good energy habits. Using icon displays would make the system easy to navigate and understand, while the use of size and colour will indicate the severity of the energy consumption of rooms and devices, wherever you are in the home.

The experience fore-fronting this system would be a haptic response whenever the user interacts with the energy device. The haptic vibrations would feel like a heartbeat and suggest the home is a living entity with emotions and feelings that are affected by energy usage.

Semantically, I choose to use the traffic light colour system as users will be familiar with the meanings of these colour combinations through tacit knowledge and act accordingly with action, along with increase in size and animation too.

For my infographic presentation, I wanted to attempt a finished and resolved outcome that showed promise for development. I believe this concept was rather strong and only needed some refinement to complete. My feedback during the presentation was mostly positive and I was rather proud of the concept I created within such a short amount of time. In terms of graphical elements I believe they were far from refined but some of the conceptual elements were beautiful; like feeling the heartbeat of the home. I believe this experience would be a new and interesting sensation and would immerse the user more within the energy consumption of their home though a simple elegant interaction.

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Concept Development Exploring and experimentation with the initial idea proposal to expand the purpose and value of the proposed experience

Following on from the Infographics Workshop, I started to build a strong concept around the theme of giving the home a “heart” but wanted to develop this idea further into how this system can operate and integrate into existing home systems.

Focusing initially on interaction touchpoints, I found that conventional switches and sockets would be ideal interaction areas for this home upgrade kit.

These touchpoints would act as communication links towards a home ‘hub’ which will manage and process all the collected data and send signals back to the connected devices to inform the user of the home’s energy consumption status through a

specific interface and response system integrated into each of the connected products.

During this development, I wanted to explore and experiment with the limits to which I can convey the home’s emotions. This was a unique idea and deserved to be implemented into the design. By personifying the house through an array of sensory outputs, could the experience feel more immersive and real? I believed that this was a strong concept and was eager to develop it extensively but eventually during the process, I noticed that I had lost the essence of what made this ideas special in the first place and have to reign in back in the end.

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System Development Demonstrating how the proposed system would work and integrate within a domestic environment with a system map of the connected products in a series

Model Development

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Semantic creation of interactive models and visuals to demonstrate the intended experience To create the intended deliverables, I sought to make high resolution models of my system artefacts in order to test and prototype the concept. To emphasise the interactive elements of these models, I bodystormed with my hand to acquire anthropometric dimensions to which to build and scale my models. I would have liked to have experimented more with the shapes and forms of the devices but due to time constraints, this was at the time infeasible. I believe though the simplicity and accessibility these models offer are adequate to deliver the experience.

Due to workshop limitations at the time, I struggled to gain access to the metal workshop

in which I was going to make my models out of aluminium with detailed features. Instead I had to use a laser cutter in order to achieve my desired forms. Use of a laser cutter however meant that the models would not be perfectly finished as each layer would have to be laminated together, without access to formers, this can look rough and not refined.

To combat this I decided to assemble the models to the best of my ability and resources and then photo manipulate the forms to convey my desired material and finish. I also hoped to use a clever trick of printing onto the forms to give the illusion of the desire material and effect.

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Brand Development Creation of a brand structure to connect a family of ‘signature’ products that will deliver the intended user experience To collate my array of models together, I sought to create a strong brand that would unite all the products together into a singular system that would connect and communicate with each other in order to create a unified home network of energy monitoring and communication devices that is capable of delivering the intended user experience. To achieve this, I to create a logo, colour palette and slogan that would be the foundation of the brand experience.

I choose to name the brand ‘Spark’ as it has connotations of power and electricity as well as an emotional relationship - when you ‘spark’ with someone, it implies you share feelings with another. It also implies to start something, a very small gesture that could eventually lead to

progressive change, the haptic vibrations offer a subtle yet meaningful interaction between the user and the home. The pulsations of the heartbeat imply that the home is ‘alive’, so I found it fitting to use this metaphor within the slogan to suggest that the products, “Spark new life into your home.” Alongside a colour scheme of hot colours, the brand exerts an energy and eagerness for users to explore and interact with.

The range of branded Spark products consists of the Station - a home hub interface for assessing holistic home energy usage, the Switch to physically feel the home’s heartbeat through haptic feedback, the Socket and Surge to upgrade any electrical appliance to connect and interact with the Spark system.

Spark new life into your home

Included in the Spark Evolution Kit is the Spark Station to monitor and reflect how your energy usage is affecting your home. Spark Station links to all energy points in the home to gain an holistic view of how your house is physically and emotionally, this is then reflected through a visualisation of the home’s ‘heart’ which can indicate how your home is feeling and indicates where energy has been wasted or drained. The Spark Station allows you to interact with your home on a new level, through harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, Spark becomes a new member of the family and the heart of the home.

Spark Switch is a revolutionary new way to interact with your home and connect with it on a very personal and sincere level. Spark Switch operates and monitors any electrical device or system but enhances the user experience through astounding features. Spark Switch extends the emotional relation to your home through its innovate heartbeat haptic feedback when operated; this provides a unique tactile experience that the user can sympathise with and relate to. The heartbeat pace indicates the energy drain effects on the home and is efficiently tuned for realistic impact. Spark Switch creates a new bond between user and home.

Spark Socket transforms your existing electronics and allows them to assimilate new skills and features to elevate your user experience.

This adapter can be used with any third party peripherals and enable them to connect with the evolved smart home. The coloured light visualisation provides a subtle notification from which the user can respond proactively. The visualisation of the heartbeat also connotes how electricity is live and illustrates that through a pulse. Spark Sockets can communicate with other sockets to create a more connected experience when using electrical appliances throughout the home and deliver a coherent experience.

Spark Surge is a clever way to deal with overloading socket adopters and surge protection. Utilising snappy magnet technology, Spark Surge allows the user to choose how many sockets they need by adding as many sockets as need be. Each socket snaps into place neatly and provides light illumination to indicate which sockets are on/off. When certain sockets use to much electricity and out strain on other peripherals daisy chained to the same adapter, electrical surges can occur with disastrous consequences. Spark Surge repels sockets by reversing the polarity of the magnets to eject the overactive energy drainer and prevent further lapses in energy wastage and over-usage.

Video Development

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Demonstration of service in use and value created by new user/home interaction To illustrate how the Spark home system works and operates within a domestic setting, I created a video prototype to demonstrate the Spark system in use and the value created by using this home service for monitoring and responding to home energy interactions. The basis of the video is a stereotypical user of this type of service, casual with energy usage and consumption for a contemporary lifestyle - often can be careless and typically lacklustre when considering the effects and consequences of energy usage within his domestic environment.

Here the Spark home kit comes into action and successful alerts the user into taking action within the home. In the video, many sensory elements are illustrated such as light, sound and

touch. These provide a holistic overview of how the user interacts with the connected devices linked to the Spark system. The Spark devices all work with one another in the video to show how the background processes affect the foreground interactions between user and home devices.

The video simulates the benefits of such a system as it details common malpractice with energy interactions at home; such as leaving appliances switched on in other rooms while preoccupied elsewhere or falling asleep and leaving electrical devices on. These scenarios are common to many home users and the purpose of this video is to convey the benefits and value of having such a system installed would bring users and the home too!

Ethical Statement

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Cumulatively evaluating the ethical considerations of collection and usage of personal data...

“

From our perspective, we believe that any organizational conversation about big data ethics should relate to four basic principles that can lead to the establishment of big data norms:

Privacy isn’t dead; it’s just another word for information rules.

Private doesn’t al-ways mean secret. Ensuring privacy of data is a matter of defining and enforcing information rules – not just rules about data collection, but about data use and retention. People should have the ability to manage the flow of their private information across massive, third-party analytical systems.

Shared private information can still remain confidential. It’s not realistic to think of information as either secret or shared, completely public or completely private. For many reasons, some of them quite good, data (and metadata) is shared or generated by de-sign with services we trust (e.g. address books, pictures, GPS, cell tower, and WiFi location tracking of our cell phones). But just because we share and generate information, it doesn’t follow that anything goes, whether we’re talking medical data, financial data, address book data, location data, reading data, or anything else.

Big data requires transparency. Big data is powerful when secondary uses of data sets produce new predictions and inferences.

Of course, this leads to data being a business, with people such as data brokers, collecting massive amounts of data about us, often without our knowledge or consent, and shared in ways that we don’t want or expect. For big data to work in ethical terms, the data owners (the people whose data we are handling) need to have a transparent view of how our data is being used – or sold.

Big Data can compromise identity. Privacy protections aren’t enough any more. Big data analytics can compromise identity by allowing institutional surveillance to moderate and even determine who we are before we make up our own minds. We need to begin to think about the kind of big data predictions and inferences that we will allow, and the ones that we should not. Data should be a benefit to us as it should lead us forward from the Information age to the Data age.

”

Presentation

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For the finale of the project, we set up an exhibition within the studio space and peer reviewed each others projects Cumulating the Data project, we were to exhibit our project work within the studio with an array of deliverables. We were required to display posters, service maps, models and an ethical statement.

I found compiling these deliverables difficult due to the short time-frame I had to revise my concept from the last tutorial but through determination I managed to present all deliverables asked for. I believe my display was bountiful with quantity of deliverables but was less impressed with the quality of the items produced. For the time I had to submit my deliverables I thought I should have been proud of what I achieved for this intense project.

Data was not assessed in the usually manner of a presentation but we were simply to exhibit our items and then marking was done under exam conditions. This was a relief to me due to the effort

I exerted to achieve the required deliverables.

Instead however, we were paired up with a member of the class and we were to peer review each others work. I was paired up with Lia and it was insightful to analyse another students project submission as it served as a good comparison platform for my own and allowed me to evaluate how well I performed on the project holistically.

I was eager to hear from Lia what she thought about my submission and how much she could understand and interpret from the deliverables given. She gave me high praise for my presentation and was particularly commendable for my video prototype where she could see the value of the experience in full. I enjoyed this type of presentation as it was welcomely more calm and casual than previous project finales I have experienced.

Reflection

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Looking back on how well I performed during this project and what I have learnt from the process and outcome During the Data Experience project, I feel like I have started to The Data Experience Project was a fantastic opportunity for personal development.

From the very beginning of the project inception, I have been focused and engaged with the task at hand and have been eager to demonstrate my skills and abilities during this project.

Initially I was not accepting of my given theme that the group voted for. I believed that ‘Home Energy Interactions’ was too fuzzy and undefined as a stimulus for this project resulting in a wide array of auto-ethnography initially considered at the start of this project. Originally, I had hoped for a very unusual and exact stimulus to ensure focus and innovative opportunities when developing forward. I struggled to get past the many possible ways currently that home energy can be monitored and labelled this type of data to be quite generic and boring at first. With the help and guidance of my group however, this issue was common and easily mitigated as we defined the interactions to be user touch points around the home, which quickly narrowed down my investigation and allowed me to generate some qualitative field research in the form of auto-ethnography.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Infographics workshop with Brian Dixon. This was a new experience for me and I was glad to be learning more about graphic communication. I liked the structure of this workshop and it’s laid back approach, which built a platform from which we could be honest and open as a class about how we feel we graphically communicate our work in studio projects, it was refreshing to understanding that the many members of the class were novices when it came to Infographics.

I approached this workshop with a very open and free mindset thinking that this intersection of the project, however did not expect the outcome of this taster workshop to be an idea that I further develop into my final concept. Although sceptical of my research topic initially, I felt I took the research into my own stride when creating my Infographics proposal. Although my presentation at the end was pitching the concept I created and less about the

graphical design elements, the feedback I received was really positive and encouraging to continue the idea forward. I found this workshop to be very interesting and hoped it to be longer than it was to really reap the benefits of the learning were we absorbing during this workshop.

Throughout the scheduled tutorials, I tried to restrain my mind from going off on a tangent. I had a lovely idea and it would be a shame not to follow it through to fruition. During this process, I found myself fluctuating between ideas when developing, this made the tutorial workshops very valuable to attend as they helped balance out my ideas and supported me to a resolution with every tutorial.

Unfortunately due to missing one tutorial due to ill health, by time we had our penultimate tutorial, I was on a tangent with my concept and was advised to resort back to my original concept as this was much stronger and simple to prototype.

I was disappointed in myself for letting my mind wander this far but under pressure I jumped too far in the development process instead of continuing to pursue the directions on my research and exploration towards a cohesive and complete resolution.

That being said, even given the extremely tight time scale, I managed to bring the project back to fruition by being direct and decisive about how I was going to achieve my deliverables. I realised the importance of model making at this point and got stuck into making as soon as possible, this ensured that I could establish the other deliverables for the project deadline. I believe the final presentation went rather well and the models were well resolved for the time given. I wished I could have developed them and the brand more holistically and added a narrative to the video prototype to show how the system fits into day to day life and focus more on the user’s interaction with the home, especially how this would alter and progress over time.

Conclusively, Data Experience was a very valuable learning project for me as it taught me to adjust my process and trust my instincts more when developing concepts, as-well as introducing me to ‘data’, which I hope to utilise in further projects.