Assignment:

The purpose of this post is to synthesize and document your progress for your most recent studio. This should be an analysis of your work from this week culminating in a clear statement of your direction for the project.  You must include todays documentation in this post. This homework should take ~1 hour to complete.

• Post 5-10 images from your recent blog posts and clearly title and caption each one. This should include precedents, sketches, and photos of your work.
• Write a Thesis Statement/Project Description. This briefly describes the Soul and Body of your project or what your project is trying to achieve.
• Discuss where you began, how you progressed, and where you ended this week working on your project in terms of its :
  • concept or big ideas
  • technical ideas or trials
  • prototyping exercises
• As part of the discussion, reflect on the feedback you received from coaches and the design decisions you made based on this feedback. You will have multiple simultaneous paths – technical, conceptual -- write about them all. Relate this discussion to specific images you posted, by title of the image.
• What portions of your project still need to be figured out? Describe your next immediate steps and lay out a general schedule for the next week.

Example:

Home Base

At the beginning of this week, Roison and I were partnered up due to our interest in making an Emoto-bot that either relayed a family members emotions, or proximity to the other family members or making a device that had the ability to connect two separated people with a light that allowed them to send a light message. 

These goals lead to our first 3 ideas. Our first idea was a light board that has a light for each member that indicated to the family how that family member is feeling through the color of the light. This would be controlled with either an app or a control panel. The purpose behind this board is to let family members that are away or in college let the family know how they're doing and for anyone to check in on them. Our second idea was the same board that would instead show the proximity to the house of each family member. This would be indicated by the brightness of the light. The purpose of this would be to know who is home or in the area. The third idea was a pair of lights that two people would have that could relay a message through a light that was controlled by the number of taps one of the people gave the lamp. 

This lead to a combination of two of these, which is a family lamp that would have different circle lights for each family member and would move clockwise based on their proximity to the house. If everyone was home the lights would line up in a straight line. If someone was out of the house, this lamp would also have the ability to send a light message to their circle, showing the family they are thinking of them. This eventually evolved into being a tree in which each family member was represented by a branch that can move up and down depending on how close they are. When all the family members are home the tree will twist as if excited that they are united. 

Some feedback that we got was thinking about where these devices would be used and how to incorporate parameters for light. Another piece of feedback we got was to get the lamp to act excited. 

Our steps for this week are to focus on the technical aspects because we are pretty confident on the base of our idea. Before that we also want to make a prototype that is more mechanized.