The Life Flower
With the intent of making a tangible user interface that measures the user’s balance in life on a long term basis, the Life Flower was created. The flower is intended to take in information about the user’s daily activities and give output that reflects how much time is spent on different areas such as work, love, health, and personal development. The project included formative user studies with five participants, in form of interviews and photo journals, and summative user studies in form of three interviews.
Ideation
Considering the theories of Ikigai and Wheel of Life, which both are concerned with the balance of life, gave rise to ideas of tangible artifacts that somehow represent balance. As the themes of Ikigai were too abstract to be easily extracted from a user, the focus shifted towards a simplified version of the Wheel of Life.
Themes of flowers and balance were present in the early stages of the ideation, and continued to be present until the end.
Four participants kept a photo journal as part of the formative research.
Formative Research
The formative research had five participants, who all were subject to semi-structured interviews. Four of the participants also kept a photo journal over a few days to report on things that made them feel calm or stressed.
The results of this research suggest that achieving a sense of order is appreciated amongst the participants, and that things that are calming to some people can be stressful to others. If states were to be presented in the artifact, they should be presented in a calming way, like ambient light switching states calmly.
A survey about if and how the light in the Life Flower should represent balance was answered by 19 participants. The results of the survey led to the decision of having the light change between a warm white light and a red light to indicate the state of balance in the Life Flower. A perfectly balanced state should be represented by a white light, and as the state moved towards greater unbalance the light would gradually shift towards red.
Lo-fi paper prototypes were made as a means of trying out different ways to implement the flower.
Prototyping and Functionality
The Life Flower has a design that is inspired by a lotus flower. To fulfill the requirements from the formative research, the goal was to create a flower like object with petals that could move independently of one another. The object should be able to emit a light that could change gradually between warm white and red. The desired design should induce is a feeling of calmness when the order of the petals are in perfect balance. Furthermore, the artifact should have a presence that does not make the user need to see it all the time, at the same time the variances in the state should be clearly visible.
As time for the project was limited, the decision of only creating four movable petals for the first prototype was made. At the same time the themes for these petals were set to Work, Social life, Health and Personal growth, which were themes that emerged when looking at different versions of the Wheel of Life and trying to adapt it to four themes.
The synthetic petals were handcrafted in a wood workshop.
Materialisation
Different materials for making the petals of the hi-fi prototypes were considered before deciding to settle for a heat moldable plastic in opaque white, with thickness of 2 millimeters. The plastic was cut with a band saw, and a sander was used to make the edges less sharp. Lastly, the pieces were heated with a heat gun and shaped using a porcelain dish as base for the curvature of the petals.
To make the four movable petals able to represent a part of life each, they were all provided with a distinct symbol. The symbols were created to be easy to distinguish from each other, but still being simple enough to cut out of paper and glue on to the petals. They were made printed out in a soft red hue to match the color of the light when in an unbalanced state.
Four servo motors and a led strip were connected to an Arduino Leonardo.
Hardware
Using an Arduino Leonardo, and connecting via a strip board with a 470 Ohm resistor and a 1000 μF capacitor, four standard 9V servo motors were programmed to turn between 30 and 90 degrees. To each of the motors’ rotor blade a zip tie was attached using metal wire and glue gun, which made the zip tie work like a hinge to enable translation from rotation of the servo motors to the up and down movement of the petals. For the light, five neopixels were used. To make the light more indirect, a ping pong ball was cut in half and put on top of the neopixels. Stacking the two halves on top of each other gave a sufficient diffusion of the light.
The Result
All the components are stacked on top of each other in a cake-like manner, using foam cardboard for structure. The bottom layer hosts the Arduino. In the second layer, the four servo motors are placed. On the top layer, we have the neopixels covered by ball halves and the movable petals which are attached to the bottom with a hinge made out of tape. The zip-ties, which have the other end attached to the servo motors’ rotor blades, are attached to the down-facing side of the petals. This enables pushing the petals up and pulling them down according to the rotation of the servo motors.
The Arduino is programmed to make changes in the colour of the light and the positions of the movable petals based on input variables. The input for the scope of this project is hardcoded mock data, but the functions are made so that it should be able to work with real variables from the user’s electronic devices.
To make the device aesthetically pleasing, more plastic petals are attached around the movable ones. Furthermore, the electronic components are hidden with black foam cardboard that has been partially sliced to make it possible to bend it to a cylinder.
Summative Research
As data collection was out of scope for the project, a test of the Life Flower in its intended usage was not possible. Instead, the testing included showing the participants the prototype in a lab like environment and explaining how the device was intended to work in reality. The participants’ responses can give an indication of if the prototype gives rise to any of the problems that the Life Flower was supposed to avoid, such as making the user feel stressed. However, this research can only give an indication and not a final answer to that question. Also, the number of participants was limited to three, which is far for the research to give a definite answer.
Conclusions and future work
In its current form The Life Flower gives an example on how a tangible artifact that attempts to visualize the user’s balance in life could work. The artifact is supposed to be visual, yet not demanding attention, clear to the user while not telling too much to a visitor without knowledge about the Life Flower’s meaning, and imploring the user to try and achieve a better balance in life by having an unbalanced state.
To make the prototype work as intended in real life, a great deal of work would have to put into the collection of data, as this was out of scope for the duration of the project. Algorithms would need to be implemented to make the Life Flower interpret the data and translate it to output in form of light and angles of the petals.