After a struggle with the code, we now feel that we have a representation of being irritated.
The LED now has a light behavior that is affected by the surrounding light conditions. When the sounding get darker, the LED will be brighter and the duration between the waves will be shorter. So when you shade the light, the LED will give you an instant response. If you continue to shade, the irritation will build up. If you stop, then the irritation will decrease. When the maximum level of irritation is meet, the light will have an outburst for a couple of seconds. Then it will go into a stage where it is not responsive for a couple of minutes, and then it starts to cool off, and it will be responsive to being irritated again.
During the process, we felt the need to limit the amount of light pattern. It wasn’t understandable when too many light patterns were involved. Perhaps there is a limit to the number of light patterns you can have if it should be self-explanatory. But where does that limit go? And what is it that makes a light pattern to be understood in a non-discussable way? What is it that makes a light behavior to be interpreted in a particular way? I guess that one factor is that for some patterns, we already have an understanding for, based on what we have experienced before.
When combining different light patterns, we realized that how a transition is made is also essential for the visibility of the new pattern. We had one transition that we didn’t feel was as clear as it needed to be from the beginning. We, therefore, changed light patterns to see if it would help. And we felt happy with the new transition. But it also made us wonder if we could explore the transition. We decided to see if we could keep the old light patterns and instead tweak the transition. We tried adding a pause and also change the brightness between the two patterns. this made the change more visible, but it also made us start questioning what a transition is. Is it only the moment when the change happens, or is it more fluid? Is the brightness change a transition, or is it the change in the pattern? And how can an interaction affect the transition? It feels like there is more to explore here, but for now, it will end here.