Final Video

The Brief

The brief for the final project of our DIY Health class was to:

Design and develop an interactive system that helps you take stock of yourself to set goals and act upon your health and lifestyle. Your design intervention will include components that help you develop a systematic and ongoing analysis of how you are progressing with a keen focus on understanding and designing for closed feedback loops.

The other interesting part of the final project is that we were actively discouraged from working within our technical abilities - we were asked not to try to build these devices, and to focus on the needs of the user, the concept, the experience. This is really interesting in the context of ITP where it’s very often build first, ask questions later (to the detriment of the quality of the projects in some cases).

The Need

I started to run, swim and cycle late in life; when I was 26 I was asked to take part in a charity triathlon and I’ve dipped in and out of the sport ever since. It’s had a pretty big impact on my life; it’s weird to discover that you enjoy sport having actively shunned it for your entire life. So, I take a lot of pleasure from these three sports - and I want to get better at them for as long as I can. I suppose this is the core of my project.

When I took up sport I experimented with gadgets and devices that would help motivate me and get the most from my training. I’ve been disappointed by pretty much all of these devices. If physical activity is empowering, energetic, imperfect and sometimes emotional - the best most devices can do is quantification of time and distance. There is just this weird mis-match at an interface level between physical activity and sports devices.

So, this is where I started from - a desire to get better at physical activity and a dissatisfaction with simplistic, quantitative exercise devices. I decided to design a device that could help improve my capabilities by focusing on form rather than time/distance. Of the sports I do, swimming has the least to do with simple time/distance metrics and most to do with form - there just seems to be a need for a device that helps swimmers improve by focusing on smoothness.

Inspiration

I was really keen to avoid the problems that I see with other sports devices; the reduction of physicality to raw numbers. Instead, I wanted this device to feel more like a coach, a companion. I wanted the feedback to feel natural, appropriate to physical effort and water. I found a piece of writing by Jacques Cousteau about the invention of the aqualung that really resonated with me

From this day forward we would swim across miles of country no man had known, free and level, with our flesh feeling with the fish scales know.

The aqualung was a device that allowed us to thrive in an alien environment, augmented our capabilities and enlivened our senses. I wanted my device to unlock a sense of physical potential in the moment. I gave the project the name “Pilot” after the pilot fish - types of small fish that swim alongside sharks, mirroring their movements, sheltering from predators. There was just something about the relationship between the pilot fish and the shark that seemed to fit.

Prototyping

Building on the work we’ve done in class on feedback loops and cybernetic systems, I designed a system that could offer appropriate feedback to a swimmer in the water. I spent a lot of time crafting the description of the system; the story (which would eventually become the narration script for the video), the context of the system in a day and a series of storyboards.

As I was refining the description of Pilot, I was also refining how it would look and feel. I made several foam models that were small enough to fit in the small of my back, or comfortably on my chest.

One key thing I learned by making the models and simple holding them onto my body was that wearing a device in the middle of my body would result in all the feedback emanating from that one position. If I wanted to device to give feedback about my form in the water, then it’d be useful to have a feeling of stereo separation. As well as the central device I’d add two little pods out at the sides of my body so that I could receive more specific feedback e.g. feedback on the side of my body where I am not rolling effectively.

I took all this feedback and used a 3D printer to make the central computer and pods that you see in the final video. The printed pieces were mounted on some athletic elastic, similar to the type of thing you find in a heart rate monitor.

Shooting the Video

We were encouraged to produce a video as our final artifact for the project. I spent two hours in the endless pool at Swim, Bike, Run in Manhattan who were kind enough to let me use their pool. I shot slow motion footage of me swimming with and without the device using a Canon 7D. I used a housing for the Lumix LX5 to shoot underwater shots.

I’m very happy with the final video; it does a good job of explaining the thought behind Pilot and how it would be used in a short space of time.

Feedback and Next Steps

I’m really encouraged by the feedback I’ve had on the Pilot concept. The design of the system seems to work well in the design context, and there seems to be a genuine need out there for this device.
I’ve done some early investigation into what would be required to build the system for real, and I’m confident that it’s possible. I may tackle this as a project in 2012.

There has also been some (very welcome) negative feedback; that the device is too logical and that I didn’t take the opportunity that the brief offered to think in a purely speculative fashion. I agree with this, completely - and were I to do the project again I think I’d be more confident to push myself and the concept into more speculative places. At the end of the day I opted for a system that I knew was realistic rather than futuristic - but I still learned a huge amount by doing this.

Thanks

I’d like to thank my Spike McCue, Bobby Genalo, Roopa Vasudevan, Doug Kanter, Craig Protzel and Lia Martinez for their assistance and advice during the project. I’d also like to thank Steven Dean for leading the DIY Health class with insight, energy and enthusiasm. It was a lot of fun.