Process

Summary

Immediately after deciding on this idea of building a window, I was faced with the first problem. What is this window going to sense? What is it going to display? How is it going to display these changes in the environment?

Sense What?

What would we want to know from the portable windows? What kind of information should it give to the user? should it be a 2 layer information of 1. outside the room 2. the outside environment or not? I guess the whole point of doing this is to interact with the outside environment without having the user to put too much attention into it. ThatÕs the whole point of ambient anyway. So I think there are some interactions that I should consider.

Size

The initial plan for this project was to build a window that could sense the changes outside of the enclosed environment that surrounds the user but there was no consideration of actually making a small portable unit that users can bring wherever they go. The Original size I had intended it to be was fairly big and not quite portable.

Mobility

The everydays of a normal person more often than not includes moving from point a to b to c or even more in a single day and many of these places involves spaces without windows that connects them to the environment outside. While some visits to these places are temporal, many are on a daily basis and for long periods of time. Some examples would include designers, lecturers and office workers. They spend a huge amount of time indoors, moving from place to place for various reasons and the indoor situation could easily cause them to feel tensed up easily. By making this synthetic window mobile, I guess it helps to lower this feeling of tension even when they have to move around. In regards with the time-space compressiontheory, the distance-time ratio difference is much decreased and there is a huge increase of people travelling overseas on a regular basis

Conclusion for the size issue

After alot of research and consideration regarding the issue of mobility and the hectic city life, I've decided to make this unit mobile so it can be a personal object and adds on to the emotional level. I was also inspired by the personal moon project.

Screen Issues

There were many different choices presented to me immediately which I have shortlisted for reasons like size, mobility, wireless connection and versatility. In the end , I decided to go for the led matrix for its highly configurable screens and also because the visual look is simpler as compared to screens like handphones and psp. These complex interfaces would distract the users in the environment that they are working in for it is not immediately recognisable and needs some form of attention.

After reading some articles of how our visual attention works, IÕve decided to work on leds as my output as the light produced by leds can be eye catching enough for our peripheral eyesight but yet not over intrusive and thus allow for information to be processed without us knowing sometimes. There are going to be some moments in which of course we will be distracted sometimes like how we look out for a moment when we see its raining outside or thunder occurs.