MASTER OF INTERACTION DESIGN AND ELECTRONIC ARTS

Semester 1

Graduation Studio

Coordinator Somwrita Sarkar

Tutors Rashi Shrivastava Hao Wu

With thanks to Small Multiples, Andrea Lau and Jack Zhao for sponsoring the design brief.

Semester 2

Graduation Studio

Coordinator Somwrita Sarkar

Tutors Abhiruchi Chhikara Benjamin Doherty

With thanks to Accenture, Fjord, James Bush for sponsoring the design brief.

Research Project/Dissertation/Internship

Coordinator Lian Loke

With thanks to the internship organisations, Art Gallery of NSW and Pixii.

New challenges, New possibilites

The Master of Interaction Design and Electronic Arts prepares students to design for the future using the emergent technologies of today. This is the age when design and the arts are transformed and metamorphosed into novel, unexpected forms, the age where machines, data, and humans become seamlessly integrated into a new physical and virtual whole. From wearable computing to mobile applications to interactive architecture, responsive environments, and urban informatics, MIDEA students transcend the frontiers of how the principles of human-centred design, emergent technologies, and computing with data can come together into transformative and translational design solutions and products.

This is also the age of big challenges. With the COVID pandemic, the comfortable patterns of our lives, location, and movement, the way we work, live, and play, have all been disrupted, and the world is resiliently trying to get back to a new normal. Design faces new challenges, but is awash with new possibilities. The philosophy of design looks at difficult challenges as an opportunity for identifying advances and innovations latent in the disruption. Our students, through collaborative studios and the technical and design-focused workshops and assessments, have engaged with complex socio-cultural and socio-spatial questions, bringing to the forefront the critical social role played by interaction design and the electronic arts. Many of them have navigated and excelled in the difficult territory of working from their home countries, and successfully weaving their own and their respective communities’ personal experiences into their design work. This year’s exhibition and projects show the large breadth and depth of exploration on how design philosophies, techniques, and skills have been leveraged and harnessed by our students to come out with design ideas and solutions that are human-centred, socially and culturally sensitive, aesthetically and artistically desirable, robust and resilient in the face of global challenges, and economically feasible and beneficial.

We welcome you to the future!

The Pandemic Survival Guide

Somwrita Sarkar

Graduation Studio

We are living in uncharted times through a global pandemic that has forced us into isolation and to change the way we live and work. Will we learn next time? What if this happens again? Will our future selves remember what it was like and be prepared? The studio designs a Pandemic Survival Guide, that prepares future generations in the community to navigate through challenges and obstacles. With specific target groups from elders and seniors, to children, to single parents, to the physically challenged and mentally or socio-economically vulnerable groups, the Pandemic Survival Guide focuses on:

· Mental health and physical wellbeing · News, misinformation, lack of support for different languages and cultures · Working and learning from home, unemployment, demands of teachers · The impact on different demographics and parts of the community · Travel restrictions · Health, tracking and immunisation · Economic impacts

The studio outcome is a physical booklet, the design of which is based on the analytics and visualisation of complex data and the use of principles of interaction design, focusing on enabling the target user group with critical information to survive a pandemic.

I have designed a survival pandemic guide for restaurant’s owners in the Chippendale and Newtown area to renovate their website into a virtual storefront. The booklet is designed following the concept of a calendar. Users are able to hang it on the restaurant’s counter or walls. They can check the guide whenever they have some spare time from their work.

Panic buying is a consumer trend that emerged during the coronavirus pandemic. It is typically motivated by the fear of missing out and is a common response of a rational person who faces uncertainty, seeking control and guarantees over their future.

Designing for future generations, I investigated how we might empower family members of different age groups to comprehend the phenomenon and its impacts, providing guidance to ease this issue at the individual level. The guidebook illustrates challenges faced by different groups in our society, promoting understanding to broader communities. When the next pandemic comes, people can implement the ‘Must Should Could Would’ checklist, consider the factual evidence, and behave rationally to prevent excessive panic buying.

The Pandemic Survival Guide is designed for young adults working from home during the lockdown. As working from home is an emerging way of workforce adjustment and the expectation of future work, this guide is preparing to tackle problems in regards to physical conditions and productivity of work.

When the global health pandemic hit, every individual, community, and business was affected badly, especially those in the hospitality industry. Restaurants are one of the businesses affected the most when the government decided to apply a lockdown.

I worked collaboratively to collect my primary data from 20 surveys distributed to restaurants in the Newtown and Chippendale area, 6 interviews with restaurant owners, and 48 surveys from patrons. All the collected data was integrated into an appealing yet meaningful resource for restaurant owners to understand why they need to manage their social marketing effectively.

This project is a series of data visualisation on remote working during the pandemic. 46% of NSW workers worked from home in 2020, due to the COVID. The survival guide focuses on presenting what it is like to work remotely, what the major frustrations are for the workers. It aims at helping employees solve their problems while working remotely and allowing them to get prepared for future pandemics.

We are living through uncharted times that has forced us into isolation and to change the way we live and work. In creating this pandemic survival guide, I focused on small, local restaurant owners as they have suffered losses due to COVID-19 restrictions.

I employed a user-centric design thinking approach combined with best practices in data analysis/visualisation to create a story-driven marketing guidebook for restaurant owners. The guidebook features five easy-to-do content tips, compiled from data insights of Google Search & Google Maps, Youtube, Instagram, and examples from local restaurants to help restauranteurs prepare for a future pandemic better.

My pandemic survival guide is a foldable brochure – lighting up your business again, targeting all business retailers that have been affected by pandemics in the future. It aims to guide businesses through challenging times and offer ideas that are fundamental but vital for business transformation.

‘SISTERS’ is a pandemic survival guide for young women to use social media to break the social vacuum brought on by the pandemic. The target user of the ‘SISTERS’ survival guide is young women who are in a low mood. The data is collected by web crawlers based on the answers collected from questionnaires and interviews. It is hoped that through direct and practical data visualisation, this data can help female users break the situation and establish a good social model for women to help and promote each other.

The main aim of this pandemic guide is to help tackle mental health stressors faced by international students in a pandemic. The key messages from the guide are that international students are not alone, that they can persevere and to encourage socialisation. Most international students aren’t prepared mentally for the challenges that await them in a foreign country; add a pandemic to the mix and it’s fair to assume that students would require a gentle nudge to face the enormity of the situation. ‘The Mind Edition’ draws inspiration from personal experiences, as well as experiences that have been shared by peers. The guide is in the form of a poster that has been designed especially for the target audience, and is short and eye-catching.

Somwrita Sarkar

Graduation Studio

The global pandemic has displaced how and where we work, learn, shop and play. This has accelerated the trend of Healthcare providers to reduce costs by moving a portion of their healthcare delivery into homes. In 2020, the Australian government further encouraged this by providing greater incentives for GPs and specialists to provide Telehealth for their patients. However, healthcare providers are failing to meet increasing consumer expectations of digital experiences. With no longer needing to find a GP or a health service based on where you live, how might we improve the way patients access doctors in a way that is inclusive and equitable. The students create a digital Telehealth product that prepares and helps citizens in the community to access day-to-day healthcare during a pandemic or lockdown. The target audience is people in the community, such as seniors, or children, or disabled/ differently abled, or families or student households with all aged/all background members. The final design solution was critically assessed in terms of the excellence and sensitivity with which it attends to specific needs and requirements of the target group of users in response to the above brief, whether it employs best visual and interaction design principles and practices, and whether it is grounded in data and it is effective visualisation.

MyConnect: Making Australian HealthCare More Accessible. We were tasked to create a digital product that enabled Australian citizens to access day-to-day healthcare during a pandemic/lockdown situation. We were strongly recommended to consider systems that could be adapted and used even after pandemic life. MyHealth is an existing $2 billion investment in Telehealth. MyHealth Records is an online summary of a person’s key health information. It’s accessible by any Australian medical practitioner and allied health services.

We propose developing the MyConnect app to allow users to upload remote data to their My Health Record. Their doctor can access this data, through their My Health portal. The benefits of the app are: establish reliable communication between doctors and patients, even in times of pandemic, improve diagnostics and patient monitoring, facilitate better healthcare for remote patients, generate usable patient data and fill My Health Records, and help patients to take control of their health.

This project is a product design for to help with mental health during a pandemic. The main users are teenagers. The name ‘PanaSea’ is a combination of the concepts around panacea, medicine that can cure and heal the psychological pain and discomfort of young people, and sea, where we hope the application will release pressure off teenagers and to allow them to live a content life.

Chinese international students with mental health issues have many obstacles when they ask help from mental health services in Australia. The Emo App encourages international students to care about their mental health issues by providing relevant and important information to them through an easy to use and convenient phone app.

Capstone Research

Lian Loke

Research Project, Research Dissertation, Research Internship

Research is the pursuit of new knowledge. Design research puts the work of design at the heart of the research enquiry. Students undertook an independent research project under the supervision of Design Lab academics on topics that engaged with contemporary issues, emerging technologies and the needs of industry and community. Projects included diegetic interfaces to show exercise data in virtual reality exergames; co-creative AI for daily reflection; redefining trust in human-robot interaction through martial arts; evaluating public display of exhibition tour guide robo;, developing ethical sensitivity in interaction design educators; a toolkit to document user experience of software-based artworks in art conservation; understanding how women manage menstruation in public, and designing with country for digital placemaking. Students navigated the winding path of conducting research, starting with a research question to frame their enquiry. In the context of the pandemic, students had to think creatively about engaging with human participants using online tools, with the positive consequence of expanding their digital skills for future collaborations in a world reliant on networked communication. Design research can produce many kinds of outputs, from insights into user experience and behaviour, to the generation of novel concepts and prototypes, conceptual frameworks and new methods and tools. Some of the student outputs will make their way into practice, helping to shape the future of the profession and society.

Awareness about the destructive effects of colonisation on sustainable pre-colonial ways of living that thrived for millennia has gained increasing momentum in recent years. That has led to growing movements in the industry and academia towards understanding of Indigenous ways of relating to Country, raising questions about culturally and environmentally appropriate approaches to design. This research project, motivated by the challenge of designing an audio augmented reality storytelling application for and with the Awabakal people of New South Wales, Australia, proposes an innovative approach which identifies and consolidates design methods, principles and precepts, mapped to a sustainable design process timeline.

Software-based artworks present unique challenges for conservators due to the rapid rate of obsolescence and their often variable, procedure-based expressions. Given their mutable nature, understanding and maintaining the ‘identity’ of an artwork is important for its conservation. A user’s experience with an interactive software-based artwork has been established as a key part of its identity. Despite this, the literature reveals there is a significant research gap in user experiences with interactive artworks explicitly for conservation concerns.

This research addresses this gap through the development of a purpose-built ‘toolbox’ of methods and frameworks borrowed from the field of user experience to record and examine user experiences in the context of conservation. The toolbox has been informed by literature, past research and was applied to artwork case-studies from the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection. It includes a decision-making process developed to guide selection of appropriate tools for the study of an artwork’s user experience. The toolbox is intended to be used in the design of future studies of interactive software-based artworks.

VR exercise games (or exergames) are becoming a popular form of exercise because it enables player to have fun when doing exercise in a fully immersive environment. In order to obtain optimal exercise effects and avoid becoming overexerted, a graphical user interface (GUI) is needed to track player’s exertion while they are playing exergames. There are different types of in-game GUIs, and among them, the diegetic GUI has been shown as a potential to perform better in VR environment because of its association with game play.

This work explores how diegetic GUIs can be designed for visualising exercise information in VR exergames. Three different designs of diegetic GUI were designed in a game snowballz by Unity 3D, and then taken into a comparative study with twelve participants, combining qualitative and quantitative method to evaluate their influence on game immersion, usability, effectiveness and user preference.

Pregnancy is a journey that brings life into the world – new parents may feel a bit lost, especially if this is the first time they experience this journey.

‘Orb’ aims to provide professional support to you as a one-stop service. It also represents preciousness. ‘Orb’ genuinely believes that every baby is a precious ‘Orb’. We provide professional support through self-management and data visualisation. ‘Orb’ will help you and your baby make this extraordinary journey together.

Modern day life is more fast paced than ever, leaving individuals with limited time to manage life stressors. In response, we have seen a growing trend in the interest of adopting self-reflective practices.

This research project explored the potential for co-creative AI systems to facilitate self-reflection through working with human partners to make shared creative artefacts exploring daily thoughts, emotions and experiences. To do this, we used autoethnography and to pilot a method combining use of popular co-creative AI tools with journaling and reflective questioning, followed by a diary study with users. We discovered that while self-reflecting through AI allowed some participants to construct personally meaningful visual narratives through self-expression, other participants felt frustrated by its non-deterministic outputs. These differences were mediated by participant expectations, perceived control and understandings of co-creative AI capabilities affecting satisfaction with the created image and its utility for self-reflection.

Research has shown that emotion regulation increases our health and well-being. Designing wearable and tangible computing devices with emotion regulation capabilities is gaining popularity in the HCI research domain. However, as emotions are subjective experiences, there is often less development in individualised emotional needs and the design for customised technology.

This research investigates the process for designing customised digital jewellery to support individual emotional regulation via an autobiographical study. Self-observation data is collected on daily emotional activities through a qualitative workbook consisting of writing, drawing, and 3D modelling exercises over three months. The data is analysed through a thematic analysis process. This work contributes to the growing discourse on autobiographic research around developing customised digital jewellery.

Graduation Studio Coordinator Somwrita Sarkar

Jingning Bai Jiaoyang Cai Yidan Cao Qing Chen Leah Chen Long Chen Yuting Chen Xi Chen Zhuo Cheng Yaxin Cui Shengting Deng Fransisca Devina Hugo Dowd Xin Du Jade Du Zhengyang Feng Ollie Gan Rui Gao Yidan Gao Siyi Hong Dinuo Hou Tianyu Hou Tzu-En Hsu Xiaoxuan Hu Wen Huang Lili Jiang Jiang Yue Jiang Thanmai Korati Starry Lai Amy Leedham Sihan Lei Lin Li Meng Li Xuan Li Mengyu Li Skye Li Keyi Li Kenneth Li Jingyi Li Fino Lin Kangli Lin Nicole Lin Yongjin Liu Lily Liu Zhaoyi Liu Zoe Lu Mandy Luo Jiaqi Lyu Zimeng Ma Stella Marissa Juby Mathew Zhuoxi Shao Yuqing Su Jiawen Sun Yixin Tang Sonya Tian Ziying Tong Erin Topfer Levy Tran Isabel Tseng Iris Wang Haiqi Wang Chenyang Wang Vicky Wang Jing Wang Zihan Wang Yuxiao Wang Ke Wang Ziyun Wang Raelyn Wang Jianlong Wang Ming Wang Avery Wu Mika Xia Maurice Xiao Peichi Xie Zhixun Xu Ellena Xue Joy Yang Yixuan Yang Fangzhou Ye Peiwen Yin Aiai Ying Jiapei Yu Jianuo Zha Yutong Zhang Yuran Zhang Keira Zhang Xuechen Zhang Sharon Zhang Lucy Zhao Sia Zhao Ze Zhao Lewen Zheng Zhizhi Zou Research Project/ Dissertation/Internship Coordinator Lian Loke

Yidan Cao Estelle Chen Dylan Cheng Rein Liu Xinlan Lu Boy Steven Silalahi Sonya Tian Siena White Mei Wilkinson Yu Xia Michelle Xiang Cinyo Yang Sherry You Wendy Zhang Zhaohua Zhou