One thing that’s been on my mind recently is how we spend our time and energy. We only get so much of it in a day, and it’s very quickly expended. It’s a very obvious point, yet I find it resonates anyway.
My concept is that I would make a board of sorts that has different locations on it labelled with different activities a student could do in a day. The user is given a ball of clay that represents how much time/energy they have, and they will have to use that clay to “plan out their day” by connecting it to the different activities. The clay touching the different activity nodes will toggle them on, and at the end a series of brief animations would be played showing what the user chose. The point though, is that you can’t do everything at once; you can’t stretch yourself too thin or you’ll just end up wearing yourself out.
One part that I am still struggling with though is how I want to design the board. Part of me thinks I should take a linear approach to it, but I also wonder what other forms could look like. Also, after drawing out the boards I realized I may have to severely cut down how many inputs I can have because even though I could recycle some animations, I may not be able to use the inputs more than once.
In my pictures I included a “reset” button, because the way I am thinking this would work is the clay would “queue” the animations in a way, but to keep the interface completely physical I would need to reserve a way to reset the queue.
Not to add on more complications to your idea, but it would also be really cool to see variations in certain connections in terms of how much clay they require to complete the circuit. Say one connection requires a lot of clay such that your total amount of connections possible would decrease. That would add a lot of personalization for what takes a large or small amount of energy for you specifically.
I like the idea and interativity behind the whole project very much! I would be very curious to see how the board end up look like. Still, I could anticipate this concept would require a great amount of work. I prefer the idea to go for a more linear approach and just dont overcomplicate everything.
I have a neutral question: Does the amount of clay put on any given activity make a difference? I ask because the detection of clay seems binary, the button either gets triggered or it doesn’t, but the amount of time we spend on things is a factor in reality.
Yeah I’ve actually thought a bit about this as well. In terms of the MaKey MaKey the inputs are binary, but part of me is considering having a rule of play where for more energy consuming activities the user *has* to leave more clay. I don’t know if this would be seen as annoying though.
This idea is very interesting, as I think the clay has great symbolism and is very straight to the point. I was wondering how you plan to setup the electronics for the board?