Tuesday, November 22, 2005

final project proposal

To be honest, I found this particular task of imagining an interface of the future to be quite difficult. Trying to think of something that seemed likely to be pursued had me revisiting ideas that have already been thought of. Naturally, I became a little frustrated. That is until I hit upon something that sounded plausible to me. I was thinking about having child tracking devices be a new feature of the future. Also, I do believe it is in line with some of the questions we had to ask ourselves whilst conjuring up these ideas. Like, "What do we want from machines?" I believe we want machines to better our lives, to help make daily tasks easier and not so simple tasks simple.

So I started with an idea a close relative suggested, to have a bicycle with some sort of shield and better traction so that people could ride them in unfavorable bike riding weather. But that sounded better than it actually looked. Then I had the momentary glee of perhaps artificial trees, they would be implanted with surveillance cameras and the artificial leaves would detect local weather conditions as well as displaying them on a screen along with the time and other such useful information one might need in a location where one might only find a tree. But that seemed useless and like it would cost a lot of money more than anything else.

So finally I got to the idea I decided to run with; Child Tracking Devices. This first kind of came up with the daily paranoia my mother suffers from whenever my 9 year old step brother is due back from school. At 2:30 pm sharp she asks that either I (if I'm around) or my other step-brother keep an eye out for him as he walks down the street towards the door. I would tell her: "you need to have some kind of tracking system on that kid, it would keep your mind to rest!" To be blunt, I just don't think it's fun to stare out a window at a kid you know is going to reach the door by logical routine deduction. Unless of course someone decides to jump out from the bushes to kid nap him in broad daylight. Anyhow, the more I thought about it the more it seemed like a good idea. Why not develop some sort of tracking system for children? The microchips could be placed in little compartments on clothing, or accessories. They'd only be permitted to be used on a child up to a certain age, maybe 12. What with the countless number of children being kidnapped and disappearing each day, something needs to be done to protect them. The world isn't as safe as we want it to be.

In terms of the final piece aesthetic, I was thinking about getting some child clothing and various child accessories and placing them up on a wall. I would indicate the location of the microchip with red wool leading to a large drawn satellite which would then be connected to a large drawn earth (still with the red wool). I would include illustrations of where children could be while being tracked along with illustrations of how parents can get information about their child’s location. On some of the child clothing, I’ll add a red tag to the existing price tag, which would be a way to distinguish which items of clothing have microchip pockets already sewn into them. The idea is to give people the option of tracking their children, which gives them control (and a peace of mind) over the interface, not the other way around.

sketch :


Image hosted by Photobucket.com

*for the proposal : i used what i first wrote about the user interface design project and added onto it*

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home