Reflection

Reflect on the process of making this project. What did you learn? What would you do differently?

In our overloaded information age, making one's own ambient display is a discovery of the subtle yet powerful possibilities of filtering what one wants to see and when one wants to see it. The ambient display need not be only functional, it can be art. Arguably, the aesthetic potential alone largely justifies such a device.

For our device, the sleek-black-microchip-shaped front face serves as a necessary frame for the interior lights but also as a decorative device that one could place next to such things as indoor flowers and family photographs. The changing lights make the device alive distinguishing it from the other inert decorations.

We learnt to use scrapped data to trigger secondary actions as alerts and to use applets in ifttt. At a more basic level, laser printing for the first time was a revelation too. The process of putting the physical device together had its lessons too - mainly that prototypes of both code and design, need to be made at several stages before the final product is satisfactory.

In hind sight and with more time, we could have enclosed the device entirely in black to make the front display prominent. We could have used more lights and distributed them more evenly to create a more diffuse and glowing light effect. We could also have monitored it more to see the simultaneous effect of both the news and stocks triggers. As it is, there is no stock action on Saturday and Sunday which is when we monitored it.