#1 The Dinner

Concepts 

What comes to your mind when we talk about connections? To the four of us in our group agreed on how a dinner table, no matter with family or friends, would successfully represent the magical moment where we can feel the connections between each other. However, the magical moment fades away once someone picks up their phone and starts texting. But what if the table would collapse once someone gets distracted and picks up their phone? In our opinion, it would be a great reason for people to be off their phones for a while. Our table have this LED circle that requires people to put their phones in before they start eating. If anyone take away their phone during the dinning process, the table collapse and no one would be able to eat. Sometimes people would hesitate whether to tell their family members or friends to stay off their phones or not. We are expecting that with this table, people can be encouraged to express their feelings more and value these moments they have with people they care. 

Successes and Failures

The success of this project would be that it perfectly illustrate the specific scene where a lot of people encounter or least have a clear taste of the Connection Paradox, the dinner table where people you're eating with are on their phones. The prototype itself successfully shows the kind of dramatic effect I was looking for. As someone picks up their phone and takes it away from the table, the round table collapse. In our original idea, the collapse of the table represents the collapse of effective interaction between people sitting at the same dining table. What's more, the phone being taken away represents people's attention shifting away from the table. We learnt earlier in Crawford's article, 'The Art of Interaction Design' that a high-quality interaction has to have its three component, input, process and output to be all of high quality. The table here tries to guarantee the quality of inputs and outputs at a dinner table.

And the failure would be that this table does it job ,which is bringing people together by forcing them to put their phones down, is a punishment mechanism. If companies do want to sell them, whether people would purchase something that will definitely make their life harder is the question. What's more, as Star's comment on our project, we did fail to take into consideration the what the advancement would take place in communication technologies 100 years from now. If I were to adjust anything, I'll do something creative with the assumption of people's mobile devices, for example, a built-in chip that does AR texting. But still, the mechanism of the table will remain the same, once you disconnect the mobile device used for communication, the table collapse. The phone and the table would be connected through magnetic forces, almost like how the wireless charging works.