Media Design Program | Art Center College of Design

This is NOT a knob!

Productive Interaction

This is NOT a knob is a physical computing final for Productive Interaction class. We were asked to transform an Arduino and a knob to an interactive design. My pitch was the 2010 MDP Baseball. In this design, participants played as a pitcher who interacts with the pre-recorded videos. There were five batters in the video, which were consisted in three different results, "Strike Out", "Home Run" and "Hit by Pitcher". It required players fully interact with their whole body.

The design process was complicated in different levels. The logic of the entire interface structure needed to be well planed out. It was similar to an UI structure for any consumer electronic device. The method of interaction was another challenge. I experimented with several different types of interaction, some including throwing baseball into a revolving door. They were intriguing but problems started to occur when first several prototypes were tested. After a number of revisions, I decided to abandon the problematic methods so it wouldnˇt interfere with the idea and lose the focus. I divided the values of the knob (0 to 1023) into three ranges. Clips were played depended on the range after the baseball was spun. As to the physical form, I chose to reveal the entire IC board instead of hiding it. I personally liked the contrast of the baseball and the Arduino. It was a visual message that speaks for itself about how this design actually works.

The characteristic of physical computing is that you have to learn from mistakes. You can't plan everything out in head. From my experience, most of the time the outcome was different than what I had in mind. When a project that required many detail attentions, designer has to try many errors before it comes to a perfect conclusion.

Very often, we hear debates about the meaning of design. I was a big follower. However, in this case I simply wanted it to be entertaining from the very beginning. I particularly wanted the experience with Arduino to be fun and joyful. Very often media design projects are complex in meaning and abstract in form. It makes designers difficult to commune with general public. I believe media design is about communication. In this case, it is friendly enough to most users instead of scare them away.