Calm Computing and Ambient Media
Albert Hodo, Ashwan Kadam. Tangible User Interfaces, Fall 2022
Prompt: What might be “important but not critical” information (c.f., Pousman & Stasko) you might want to monitor over time? Brainstorm ideas for ambient media where the information is conveyed via calm changes in the environment so that users are more able to focus on their primary tasks while staying aware of non-critical but important information that affects them.
Solution: Brainstorm and Sketches
We brainstormed various Ideas for ambient media where information is conveyed via calm changes in the environment so that users are more able to focus on their primary tasks while staying aware of non-critical but important information that affects them.
We had some interesting ides during our brainstorming session. Some of the ideas we got for ambient media were;
- A projected star system to track different unread emails.
For a person who has many email streams and does not check his emails regularly, we designed a star system that shows different clusters of stars that grow when the inbox gets flooded.
2. Music Stream count
Our persona for this idea was an artist who puts his songs on Spotify. We came up with a projected map of a region and used dotted lines that light up a path to the various regions. We tracked the growth of frequency of streams per region based on the speed of the streams.
3. London Mimosa
This is based on the famous London bridge. Our persona was a tourist who just got back from London and found the London bridge fascinating. We designed an ambient system where we had a Mimosa plant that closed its petals anytime the London bridge opened and vice versa
4. Time Mirror
We had an idea where you can track the time of day of another part of the world by having a projection of the rise of the sun from the east to the west. This was based on a persona who had loved ones in a different country that had a 12 hour time difference and wanted to know when the right time to call was.
Final Design Choice (London Mimosa)
We decided to choose our idea for a London Bridge Ambient Display. For our mechanism, we wanted to focus on a system analogous to a Mimosa pudica, or the shameplant. The shameplant has a soothing, slow opening and closing mechanism for its petals. When the plant is touched by an object, the petals close. For our system, we wanted a way to form a biomimicry system that correlates the petals closing to the London Bridge opening and closing in real time. Our ambient system is a mechanical pot of flowers, similar in form to the shameplant, that closes its petals when the London Bridge opens, and opens it petals once the London Bridge is closed again. We chose this design because it seemed to possess the truest form of ambient information — information that does not need to be acted upon immediately, but can be observed and registered at the lowest form of consciousness. Additionally, we chose this idea because of its form factor — our other ideas took a more literal connection between the form of the ambient system and the data it represents, but this idea relied more on a metaphorical connection.
We decided to go with a form of biomimicry that related to a simple phenomenon in nature because it is known to be calming and slow, which are common design choices in ambient media. Additionally, the decision to use a plant was chosen because its change in form is easily detectable through peripheral vision, meaning one can easily associate a closed plant from the side of their vision to the London Bridge opening up. This inverse relationship between representation (closed plant — open bridge, and vice versa) also intrigued us, because it requires a rule the user must keep in mind when observing the system, further placing the Representational Fidelity within the scope of a symbolic system.
To interact with the system, a user would simply leave the system off to the side (on a shelf, by a desk, etc.) and glance over whenever the motion of the plant caught their attention, informing them immediately of a change in the state of the London bridge.
I worked on this with Ashwan Kadam. It was also a nice introduction to Ambient Media and Calm Computing. A special thank you to Park Haesung for helping us with the beautiful final illustration :)
