Interaction Design

The Memory Tile Game

After a trip to an elderly care facility and field research, a memory tile game was created to get seniors moving, cognitively involved, and find a fun way to interact and play with young children and family members who come to visit.

We began the project with a trip to a nursing care facility in Brumunndal where we would be able to conduct field research and interviews with residents, nurses, and some children if possible. This visit allowed us to see what it is like to live in these types of facilities and the type of people that live and work there. We found that many residents had cognitive and/or physical disabilities, and very few of them were active. There aren’t enough for the residents to do which was a concern that many of the staff had. This led us to the inspiration of creating a prototype for physical exercise. We witnessed a few elderly residents in the training room doing physical therapy and a couple of us participated in it with them which the residents seemed to enjoy. After this visit, our question became “How do you make a physical activity more fun and practical?”.

To start the design process, we began with ideation by playing Post-It Poker (or Post-Up) from the book “Gamestorming”. The four categories that we established were location, object, disability, and action. After each team member wrote at least 5 post-it notes for each category, we laid them out randomly to generate ideas. After a couple rounds of discussion and dot voting, we ended with three ideas. We then reviewed our photos from the visit which led us to change one of the ideas into a physical game where the elderly and children could step on tiles on the ground and see an image or video. The idea was that the images and videos could potentially come from the residents’ families or something that they enjoy to give them motivation to step on the tiles and try to remember which tile was related to a specific image. This could be played with children as well as a bonding experience that is active.

After our idea was approved, we created an NABC (needs, approach, benefit, and competition) for the product to get a better understanding of where to go next in the design process. Based on the NABC, some of the keywords that we wanted to stress were movable, customizable, therapeutic, and visual. This led us to complete a workshop on Arduino as a way to create our prototype. After the workshop, we decided to make some sketches and scenarios since we had already been provided with the users and created the personas based on them. Before moving on to building the prototype, we wanted to have another workshop to discuss all of the semantics of the project such as the design, the functionality of the project, and all of the components required. The game evolved into a mix between Dance Dance Revolution and a Matching Pairs card game.

The next step in our design process was to make a moodboard of how the game would look visually as well as the types of materials that the tiles could be made of. After input from our course professor, we went into the prototyping stage. We began with a paper prototype and then built a medium fidelity prototype out of cardboard tiles and Raspberry Pi instead of Arduino. We did a short usability test with students since we could not test with the elderly residents. After a few changes, we presented our prototype to the nursing care facility and received feedback from them as to if this was something that they believed would be beneficial as well as advice on what could be done next.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jipXfHMkyw0&feature=youtu.be

FamilyScale

Through research, personas, scenarios, collaborative workshops, prototyping, and testing, a medium fidelity prototype of a bathroom scale focused on families with growing children was created.

https://xd.adobe.com/view/cd279c8f-d879-4acf-4aa9-45c2fc5ff318-bb16/?fullscreen&hints=off

Drone Website

By conducting research, interviewing relevant potential customers, creating scenarios, card sorting, and wireframing, a website for drone enthusiasts, researchers and educators was created to find and share information, projects, and more.

https://www.figma.com/file/NpGmzCOeG19xXTJOAx0zqG/Drone-Website-1.2-Desktop
https://www.figma.com/file/JpxF7LdfDrgyo71EgL93bD/Drone-Website-1.2-Mobile

Redesign of E-Learning Platform

After a heuristic evaluation of NTNUs current e-learning platform, a redesign was completed to focus on reducing cognitive load and increasing ease of submitting assignments among other things.

https://xd.adobe.com/view/0cff4289-e36e-445b-9363-f905df72c1d7?hints=off

World Disease Simulator

In a multidisciplinary team of interaction designers and computer scientists, a prototype in Unreal Engine was created for a world disease simulator to show how diseases in history have spread and to show how vaccines and antibiotics help fight these diseases.