Week 8

Week 8 was a week of change, with our original idea being thrown out.  The week started off well with Kyle telling the rest of the group that he was progressing well with his work to get the Wii fit balance board working to measure weight.  Then came Wednesday.  I was, unfortunately, struck by food poisoning and was unable to attend the first half of the day.  In this time Max and Hamish had decided that our original idea was too boring and generic and, with help from the tutors, had decided to take it in a new direction.

Once I’d come into class I was informed of a few things, firstly that we should use an IR sensor rather than a Kinect and secondly that we needed to redesign our idea.  I was happy with both of these suggestions because I had been feeling like the idea had been getting pretty stale, too.  Because Rob had responded so well to the idea of insulting people by calling them fat we decided that we could harness this idea for our system.  Max and Hamish had also talked to the tutors and they had suggested taking a more “adult” approach to talking with adults and we thought that this was the way to do that.

We brainstormed in that class on ways to achieve this, throwing out ideas like an app that throws out random insults about your physical health.  We developed these ideas until we came to the idea of having a syntax for sentences that could be insults or compliments, depending, so changing a couple of the words in the sentence based on a person’s current weight and performance.  For example the sentence “You’re fat and don’t do enough exercise” could be easily turned into “You’re fat but you do enough exercise”.

We then talked to Somwrita who was very interested in the idea of customising feedback for the user; we talked about generative advertising and promotion in order to get people involved in their own health.  In this time we’d moved more away from the insulting factor to the customisation that we had found in our brainstorming surrounding it.

After our meeting I set up our next few steps, which were: Talking to Kyle about the idea, as he had been unable to attend and workshopping our idea until we managed to figure out exactly what form our solution would take.  To this effect Max and I agreed to meet on the Sunday of the week in order to work together on the problem, brainstorming possible solutions.

After this I summarised the Health literacy as a public health goal paper I had been planning on summarising the week before.

On the Sunday Max and I were thankfully able to get through a huge amount of work.  We realised that our system in its original form was still interesting, just the first stage of the whole process, that is the obtaining of information from the user, was boring and undeveloped.  In order to remedy this we threw out a huge range of solutions to this problem.

The main theme of our ideas, which interested Max and I greatly, was choose your own adventure games.  These ideas took several forms including getting given a character based on their height and weight then when you try to make it the character you want it tells you how to get fit, story where, in order to beat the dragon you have to go for runs, eat healthily etc. (in game clicking button) bad choices could even have short term benefits with long term consequences., General story where the user makes choices and the win or fail based on these choices then feedback is given.

The point of all of this was to a. get information from the user on how they lived their lives and to b. give them feedback on this information, pulling through the customisation stream we decided to follow earlier.  The user’s feedback would be customised to their own lifestyle in order to give them advice they could actually act on.

What we ended the day on was that the input to the set up would be “A choose your own adventure game which using choices between easy with short term benefits and hard with long term ones highlights health issues as well as getting information from the user in order to highlight their own person potential health issues. We can extend this by using the data gained in the game create visualisations etc.  Not all choices are black and white and we could highlight this.”

We then organised to meet Kyle on Tuesday morning in order to get his feedback on the idea as Hamish was away until Wednesday on a sailing Regatta (which he, again, won).  That all went well but I’ll cover that in next week’s blog post.

Overall we’re heading in a much better direction at the end of this week.   Hopefully we can really realise our ideas in the next week and pull it all together, with the approval of the whole group.