Nov 11 - 25 (6th & 7th week)

Teammates -Anya, Prashanthi Bala, Jacob, Ranga, Doris Alvarez,

<aside> 🔍 Brief: Design a way to express the skin/world interface.

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Week 6

After the debriefing, our group started having general conversation about the various ideas and the possibilities seemed immense. I suggested that the group could do a speed dating exercise in order to figure out the design ideas. But the rest of the group agreed that we do AEIOU first, which made sense to me later on. At the end of the AEIOU exercise we helped to arrive at some idea which did not happen.

Then there we wanted to explore this idea of covering everyday objects with actual chicken skin and see if there any change in emotion connection to the object. As an idea it seemed pretty convincing to try it out, but when we did try this on objects like mouse, keyboard and teacups. It was a fun experiment but we were all grossed out by the cold chicken skin.

We were wondering what was missing that is there is there in the actual human touch. The smell was obviously disgusting but the other main property that was missing was the warmth. We were moved by news article that talks about the technique that uses surgical gloves and warm water to warm the hands of COVID-19 patients in isolation suffering from deprivation of human touch to support them during their final hours.

This inspired us to make an experience that comforts people through human touch. A pair of warm palms on one’s cheek could be emotionally reinforcing. We wanted to test this out, and so, we built a prototype that would try to replicate this as closely as possible.

The idea was to use these reusable hand warmers inside surgical latex gloves. We added sponge and play dough to add to the elasticity of the actual palms.

Even though the volunteers were apprehensive in the beginning due to the colour and look of the gloves, they enjoyed it once they put their face on it. Some of them instinctively wrapped their arms around the stand on which the gloves were supported. This was an accidental thing that was achieved.

We also made a lasagne model to magnify and replicate the layers of skin.

After our presentation, we received feedbacks on the prototypes. Some said the lasagne interested them and some said the hand hugger is better to be explored. People still found the gloves to be appalling.

Week 7

After the presentation from our first week with Alaistair and Tonicha, we understood the importance of the lack of observation in terms of AEIOU, and so we did the research method to observe people in different environments which are in relation to human touch with everyday objects.