Our group ended up running into a lot of walls while working on our old project, so we decided to go with a different prompt. Instead of designing an interface for collaborative brainstorming, we've decided to design an interface to help make ordinary people a little more superhuman.
Since we thought it would be easier to work with something we knew, we decided to start with what we needed as Wellesley students. The answer was that we needed to keep track of basic things - like exercise, sleep, water, and food - that often take back seat to school work. We decided to design a superhero suit that keeps track of these things for you, then alerts you when you need to attend to them.
What we want to make is a suit that:
1) Monitors your heart rate
2) Monitors how much water you've drunk
3) Monitors how much sleep you've gotten
4) Monitors how much food you've eaten
5) Monitors how much social time you've had
When any of these categories got low, the suit will alert you. We originally thought an app for a smart phone could alert you, but after discussing this with the class, many people suggested that it might be more compelling for the suit to alert you in some other, more easily perceived way, since that is the real appeal of TUIs.
This brought up the idea of public vs. private information. While many people in the class noted that you might not want your professor to know that you only got two hours of sleep the night before, Consuela pointed out that it might be better for people around you to know that you're having a rough day.
Some parts of this might be too difficult to implement, but I'm excited to start thinking about it. Our professor suggested using phidgets for the suit, which would be interesting to work with. Overall, I'm pretty excited to start thinking about the project more seriously.
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