DECO2300 was focused on interaction design and how we can design interactions with technology beyond the traditional keyboard and mouse. The course taught us technical skills with the Unity Game Engine and hardware programming through Arduino as well as skills around developing physical prototypes and testing them with users. The brief for this course required us to develop three distinct prototypes that create novel user interactions, build upon each other and the same initial concept that relates to one of four themes provided.

The theme I selected was “Augmenting Everyday Life” where I aimed to augment how people interact with the climate control systems in their homes. I did so by creating the concept of the climate changing ball, which a physical ball that glows a colour representing the temperature the system is set to, the user then moves around the house and the temperature of the room they are in will follow them, which makes sure these systems are only active where they currently are.

Prototype 1 only required the use of Unity, so I focused my efforts on designing a temperature control interface that would be both novel and intuitive. I decided to use a dial that represents the metaphor of day and night that represent the temperature at the time that user sets. For example, cooler temperature during the night and hotter temperatures in the day.

Prototype 2 introduced the use of Arduino and creating a physical interaction for our testing. Based on my previous testing, I discovered that users like having both options of having a physical device and a centralised interface to control the temperature. As such, I decided to build temperature control functionality right into the ball that the users would already have. The testing session was then focused on making sure this interaction makes sense and is intuitive enough for users to actually use in an actual implementation.

Prototype 3 added a requirement of us to design for use cases where multiple people would be using the system in a larger space (like a school or office). For this, I created the zoning and averaging functionality where a large space could be split up into zones (which act similar to rooms in the initial concept) where the temperature of the zone would be controlled by the ball in it. If multiple balls exist in the same zone, then the system will do its best to average the temperature across all the balls.