Infra Ordinary

After reading the article, it made me re-think the way I should view the experiences that I encounter in my day-to-day life. By observing, and also questioning, everyday objects that I see, this not only allows for opportunities to change the current state of something but also it allows us to pick up on details which have faded away due to seeing them to often. To some extent, this reminds me of the designs made by Nendo whereby the story of each piece reveals something ordinary but is shaped in a different way so as to renew this ordinary aspect.

Embodiment

Within this reading, I was particularly interested by a phrase: Designing the counternance of an object is also creating an ambience that includes this background. Instead of just seeing the function or the appearance of the piece, Naoto sees its broader picture, which is the way it alters the space within which it is. This way of thought intrigues me as instead of just focusing on the product, we moved to a broader perspective and think about the experience of the user interacting with the piece, and the piece interacting with the space. To some extent, we become less of a product designer and instead a designer in general who sees in a more abstract terms, in this case the experience.

The Library-In the library, Day 3 (Submission Day)

(Easing section)

(Rising section)

(Waking section)

During the day of submission, I had the opportunity to hear a person who was sleeping next to the box her feedback about the installation. She removed the bean bag found in the installation since she felt that the colours being projected were to bright. When doing the project, I knew that the use of colours to control the quality and duration of sleep would not work for everyone. Prof Michael mentioned for his part that if I were to keep on with this project in the future, maybe I could consider sound such as white noise. In the end, I enjoyed doing this installation and would definitely do more if I get the opportunity to do so!

The Library-Colour Selection Process

For the choice of colours, one of the main criteria to choosing them is brightness. So what I had in mind was to begin the napping session with a dark  colour like blue and end with a bright colour like yellow probably.

https://www.colormatters.com/color-and-vision/color-and-vision-matters

https://www.quora.com/What-color-do-humans-see-as-brightest

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325476/Want-good-nights-sleep-Find-colours-use-bedroom-avoid-decent-kip.html

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/attentiongrabbing-colors-74162.html+

I read some articles (links above) concerning the brightness of colours, and in the end concluded that blue was the darkest colour and yellow/fluorescent green was the brightest. However, what would be in the middle was not really brought up in the articels, so I had to test out by myself to see which colours would be in the middle.

After some trials, I finally settle on some colours which are: blue, purple, orange, red, aqua, yellow, pink and neon green. The order of the colours are arranged in increasing brightness order. With the colours decided, I then put the colours together into a 30 minutes video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdL82U5Yp3A (link to first video)

When I was done with the video, I realized that the function of the bright colours at the end of the video were not really working in terms of waking the sleeper. To resolve this issue, I changed the time frame for each colour and their order. In the first video, each colour had a time frame of 3 minutes. But in the new one, the video was broken down into 3 sections. The first section is the easing section which consists of displaying the colours blue, purple and orange on an interval of 1 minute each for 15 minutes. The second section is the rising section which consists of displaying the colours red and aqua on an interval of 30 seconds each for 10 minutes. The last part is the waking part which consists of displaying the colours yellow, pink and neon green on an interval of around 1 second for 5 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyMhoHwOVSQ (link to new video)

The function of the first section is to mainly help the person to fall asleep. Then the second section is to sort of start to wake the person up by displaying brighter colours. The interval is also faster. The last part is literally to wake the person up by annoying them with very bright colours. The flash intervals are also part of the waking up process. Compared to the first video I did with the colours, this one I believe is more effective since there is more progression along the video.