I’m really bad at keeping up with my journal but today I got a super friendly reminder from Scott and I decided to add all the posts I was missing 🙂 YAAAYYYY! Thanks Scott!
So here we go:
Earlier on the semester I took an invention from the junk shelf, a cardboard tube attached to a horn, and added some LEDs that would only turn on when the user blew the horn. The aim of the exercise was to create a switch that could turn on LEDs without being pressed by the user’s fingers. In my case, I took a normal switch and attached it to the horn so that the user would press it with his/her lips.
Here’s what the circuit looked like:
The interesting part about the user experience was the illusion that what turned on the LEDs was the air blowing through the horn and not the lips pressing a switch. This is important in thinking not only how systems work but also how the user perceives they work to focus not only on creating an objects that work in a certain way but experiences that are imagined in a certain way.