The DiVine Garden is made for the New Futures squad, which focusses on Living Environments in the future. My peers and I made this interactive in-house hydroponic garden which allows all family members to maintain their garden throughout the day. Users implement 3 elements into the garden with simple actions and receive rich feedback through light, sound and movement. This was to enlarge the self-control in the future home since there is a worrying trend of daily tasks getting automated and losing control in your own home.
The Project 2 mainly stimulated my skills for three expertise areas. The group had a hard time communicating about the various design concepts in the first few weeks. I learned to visualize my ideations and concepts in multiple ways of sketching and rapid prototyping. These creative & aesthetical visualizations helped to communicate with group peers and coaches to elaborate further design steps.
The design scope was focussed on rich interaction. Therefore, we analysed user perceptions means a user test. This user test was learnful about the user perspective on our new design concept. This nescience was intersting to notice and thaught about the unfulfilled gaps in the design concept. Next to the practical steps like user acquisition, method setup and analyzing results, the user test in the design process improved my skills in User & Society.
Lastly, the final prototype of DiVine was meant to communicate and visualize the rich interaction the user was able to experience. With the use of magnets, leds and sound in combination with the three interactive ways to “feed the system, the Divine prototype was able to able to tell the story of rich interaction and feedback to the user. The use of electronics into the rather large prototype thaught me skill within Technology & Realization which can use for future projects. Especially, the mix of movement, lights and sounds was interesting to display.
