We have some great news: You can participate in a visual demonstration of the Meditation Lab Experimenter Kit the 28th of October on Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven.
At the moment the project really satisfies me. We still get deeper into many aspects of the Silence Suit as you can read in the following.
Reflecting on the collaboration
As you can read in our last two blog posts, Danielle and me are both reflecting on our collaboration with technician, software engineers and designers. By chance, we got a call for a paper this week by DRS Special Interest Groups on Experiential Knowledge. They want to collect papers about experiential knowledge in collaborative interdisciplinary design research. By reflecting further on our personal experience we could contribute a paper to that interesting collection. We choose to work together on one paper and I am really excited about it. Personally, I hope to get clearer what the role of an artist means to me, by reflecting further on the collaboration I am observing in the case of this project.
Deepening of the content
I see that Danielle is working hard to get more knowledge about the influence of light on meditation. She reads many academic articles about how light can influence the relaxing and the activating atmosphere of a room. She mainly wants to focus on first calming the one who is going to meditate and later facilitate his focus while meditating. I find it impressive how she appropriates the knowledge to formulate her own criteria for her own scenarios as you can read here. By still acquiring more knowledge, Danielle retains the deepening of the content of her vision.
NoSQL database
The complexity of the project, I described to you last time, is also noticeable in the setup of the database. Simon de Bakker from ProtoSpace is working hard on the NoSQL database. I learned that this database consists of many different tables. Every table describes one aspect of the whole, such as sensor, session or user. Every table is connected to other tables. That is the point where it gets so complex that I find it difficult to explain. But I understood that it connects for example the user with the suit he is working with. The table about the sensor is first in general about all sensors. When it comes to the suit, as you can see in the following picture, it describes among other things the id of the suit and which specific sensor sits in that suit. When it detects a wrong value the data base learns that one of the sensors does not work. The user first has to know in which suit the specific sensor sits. So that he can later see which sensor it is and how he has to work on it. This is only one example of the correlations which have to be programmed in the NoSQL database, which makes it that complex.
Wire frames
Anne (Protospace intern) is working on the wire frames. I brainstormed with Danielle about the design of the screens. By formulating the criteria, it gets clearer to me what the message should be when the user opens the platform. The atmosphere of a zen meditation and the feeling of calming down do not have to be present in the design. That is something you experience while meditating. Via the platform Danielle wants to transfer the idea of an experimenter kit, tools and functionality. The wire frames have to work as a manual for the kit.
Button ring
To optimise the comfort and the functionality of the Silence Suit we worked further on the button ring to mark a moment in the timeline of your meditation session. I think now we got the most optimal version of the ring. We succeeded in making a ring from conductive fabric functioning as a button sensor. So that the position of your hands do not matter.
Anyway, you can push the button without much effort while meditating. In the following picture you see the data of our experiment. When you push the button the value minimises. Even if the sensor is a little unstable, you can see clearly the marked moments in your timeline. I am satisfied seeing the success of developing the ring over many weeks in data.
Generally, I enjoy the moments when our experiments yield insights which bring the Silence Suit to the next level, so that it takes more and more form. Especially, the inspiring conversations with Danielle help me to understand the context and the correlations of the project and the project itself. Personally, it brings me further in my positioning as an artist by comparing my practice to hers.