Visualizing Heartbeat through Digital Fabrication
This student project addresses stress among young adults. It describes a concrete set of components to use in participatory digital fabrication processes with the goal of increasing positive social interaction between participants and give them creative tools for managing stress. The present demo focuses on the design process, results of our fieldwork and analysis of young adults as participants in developing of digital fabrication design concepts for reducing stress among young adults.
About the demo
The problem we try to solve through participatory digital fabrication is negative stress and the effects thereof. We want to make a design that can help young adults handle stress by having them become aware of themselves, their body and the people surrounding them. Accordingly, the participants in our workshops have worked creatively with the design, explored and shared progress and ideas with each other.
Combined the design team spent three schooldays observing 14-15 year olds in their classrooms and another three days interviewing them. All in all, we interviewed 20 young adults individually for half an hour each focusing on stress related events, eliciting factors, feelings, opinions, views and the context related to these. We then organized a workshop where we the design team worked close together with four 14 year olds. The workshop was divided into two segments. The first part of the workshop consisted of a group discussion with use of inspiration cards as method to cover the topics of handling stress and the possible solutions with the use of digital fabrication. In the second part we moved from cards to digital fabrication with an emphasis on fabricating and using heartbeat sensors. We discussed, explored and played around. At the end we evaluated each others mockups and design proposals.
Before the conference we expect to have organized one or several additional workshops. These workshops will focus even stronger on user participation and fabrication. Here, we will invite young adults to try out our design concept; participants using digital fabrication to visualize their own heartbeat.
Our design concept and proposal should be seen as having a dual goal. One goal being social; getting pupils to work together and, thus, strengthen their relations and community within a class through establishing an explorative, playful and creative attitude towards stress with digital fabrication tools. The second goal being individual; letting pupils see one another in a new way, by having their individual heartbeats visualized for everyone to see through their digital fabricated hearts.
The project presentation will consist of a video that will showcase the design concept and proposal in action; a prototype of the ‘visualizing heartbeat’ concept as well as poster explicating the participatory digital fabrication process.
Presented by:
Line Buur Skovgaard – MA student in ICT-based educational design, Aarhus University.
Johannes A. Jakobsen – MA student in ICT-based educational design, Aarhus University.
Ebbe Agerbæk – MA student in ICT-based educational design, Aarhus University.
Rikke Toft Nørgård – Center for Teaching Development and Digital Media, Aarhus University.