It feels like we have had a great workflow today. We didn’t think that the ball sketch worked and decided that we would start fresh with a new sketch instead of continuing on it. I believe that this approach to test and see what works or doesn’t work and then quickly moving on instead of trying to solve all problems in a sketch has been beneficial for us. It has given us the freedom to test and not to get too attached to our work. One disadvantage might be that there is a risk that we might draw insights from a sketch that isn’t entirely true if it is based on a bad sketch that has a technical problem and not an interaction problem.
We went back to explore the feeling of resistance. When we have talked about nuanced control, we have had running as a reference and how you can become a skilled runner. We want to work with the timing of an action and how you control something based on the environmental conditions. Like how the terrain affects how a runner plans the pace and when it is a good time to adjust it.
In our first sketch, we work on how the sound environment can create more resistance and affect how well the circle can follow the mouse cursor.
I feel that we manage to create a nice representation of how sound is affecting the environment that the circle is moving in. It feels smooth to interact with the response of change in sound is quick, and you understand how it works, and you can manipulate the circle to stand in one area when it is noisy quite quickly.
In our second sketch, we wanted to see if there was any difference in interpreting the interaction if the circle also changed the size. Even though the first sketch was easy to interact with, adding that size enhanced the feeling of slowness, and you got a better understanding of the need to slow down and the response being slower.
I think that we manage to create both a visualization of the sound and a feeling of controlling the circle with the mouse movement depending on how the sound in the room is.
In this stage, we felt that we had taken a step back from the sound being an input for the control since we were controlling the circle with the mouse. So for our following sketch, we had the idea to test if we could use a canvas and let the background of the canvas represent the sound environment creating different terrain for the mouse to move over and therefore needing to be controlled in various ways.
We hadn’t been using canvas for our earlier sketches, so we began creating a sketch similar to the two earlier just to make everything work. But since we now had a canvas, we could let the circle draw, which created a trail of how the sound environment had been.
One concern we have with this last sketch is that it is starting to go outside of the scope of what we are supposed to do. Perhaps we are getting closer to creating a sound visualizer, and we also need to focus more on how we can use sound to have nuanced control.
This is something we will need to work on next week.