Physically Alternative

Dreaming Up Physical interactions for Email, Twitter and SuperMario

This was (and still is) one of the most challenging in class exercises so far. I spent most of the time in class staring at my page trying to figure out what was wrong with the current interactions and why they should be changed or how they could be changed in a way that might actually improve the experience. Needless to say there was not a great depth of interactions that ended up in my exercise book. So I am going to follow the instructions from start to finish and hopefully by breaking it down I can come up with five different interactions.

Email

Elements and Controls of Application

To get some inspiration I firstly pulled up Thunderbird and had a look at the interface to figure out exactly what I use (or dont use) it for.

My Boring Emails

The controls of the application itself were fairly simple. Mouse clicks and key presses with the occasional right click or drag being useful or required in some situations.

The elements and actions were more complex. There was the obvious, get message, send message, reply, forward, delete, archive, junk. But then there was also chat and address book functions which I did not really know about. Then there was also the tagging system the staring system the folder system.

Thinking about these I was able to come up with a few different interactions.

1. I noticed that my folders were all pretty useless and not very well maintained and I had a lot of old junk. The idea would be to have a small physical filing cabinet next to the PC set up which would have the draw open further and further for each email that was just sitting in the inbox without being filed.
2. The second idea came about from the inevitable spam that come through my emails. A simple digital click with a smiley face. The face would be happy when you had more non-junk mail and sad when you received a lot of junk or bills (no one likes bills) maybe even a shocked face for when an email from a new sender arrived.
3. Thinking about tagging, it always seems like more effort than its worth. Lots of clicking and sorting and clicking and sorting. This idea would have a projection of your inbox onto a tablet and allow you to use different colored highlighters to tag and sort your emails by coloring them.
4. I am not sure how well this idea would work and perhaps it is better suited to twitter but I will leave it here. The idea is having a old vintage scale with the two measuring cups, one would represent emails coming in the other emails coming out. The scale would adjust as you send and receive emails.
5. My last idea is similar to the first Idea and is the one I came up with in the lecture which was to have a small postbox setup where emails would be printed on post-it notes with the title and sender.

Twitter

Elements and Controls

While I am aware of twitter, how it works, and even have an account. I would not say that I have any real understanding of the twitter space and what it is all about. But just looking at the landing page I can see I can tweet, retweet, follow, tag, and favorite.

1. The first thing I thought of was a collection of Hashtag stamps which could be stamped onto a tablet or screen to add the hashtag.
2. The other idea I had was some sort of token or avatar which you could place onto something or someone to start following them on twitter. Kind of like a QRCode  type thing but creepier.
3. A retweet bird call whistle which would retweet the tweet you were currently looking at.
4. A set of clouds showing the top trending topics, tapping one of the clouds would read the tweet out to you.
5. Tag budget charm. For people who use excessive hashtags. At the start of the day you can allocate an amount of tags you can use. Every time you tag your number of available tags counts down on your charm until you can no longer hashtag.

SuperMario Brothers

Elements and Controls

The classic platforming game. Left,right,up,down, A, B. 

1. First idea is a power glove type system which becomes activated when you get the FireFlower power up. You must then make a certain action to shoot fireballs. 
2. Next idea is a classic Mario pipe (the ones you can go down) as the controller. The pipe can spin left or right to more in the direction and you can press it down to jump.
3. A miniature flag pole is placed beside your computer. At the end of every level you need to raise the physical flag before you can jump to the flag in the game and complete the level.
4. In keeping with the literal adaptations. A controller which is a plunger (because hes a plumber of course). Plunger works like a normal joystick but you can plunge it to make him jump.
5. AR projection of the game where you use your hands to control directions and flick up to make Mario jump.

Exercise Reflection

I feel like the challenge with this exercise was thinking outside of the box. Perhaps I am just too familiar with keyboard and mouse and they are my preferred control system. But I really struggled to come up with ideas that felt interesting and were not just representing the game or an aspect of the concept in a different way. While I think there are always interesting ways to represent data, I had not considered as much changing the way I interacted with applications I use regularly.