Process

We went through a long brainstorming process before we were able to narrow down our idea, form, and experience. Emily started out with this initial idea of a magical coat rack that when you placed your coat on it, by the time you picked it up to leave there was a note of something lost or remembered in your pocket. This catapulted us into the idea of creating an experience that didn’t end when the user left the physical space. However, we quickly realized that many people might not have coats in the beginning of may so we refined it to a “bag drop” because we figured many of the users would be students coming from class. We knew that our output would be a “letter” that was generated via thermal printer because Emily had experience working with that piece of technology from the previous unit. We bounced ideas back and forth about the input form, from written to text, and voice to text, and finally ended with a digital form to easily capture the information. Then we were tasked with how to capture the users actions during their time at the exhibit and convert that information into a form that we could track and place into ChatGPT. We had a wide range of ideas from having a person following the user, to qr code cans, RFID, all the way to computer vision tracking. We ended up using RFID tags but having the “tagger” be the user’s phone to decrease the extra hardware needed.