A lot of our project inspiration came from the class exploration with chatGPT and the playground. Our project uses ChatGPT in a “madlibs”/Choose your own adventure fashion to fill in the blanks of a prompt that is printed out, each output being unique. After experimenting with playground and iterating on prompt wording, we realized the limitations and affordances of using ChatGPT.
We were inspired by the e-waste project to find an aspect of commenting on the future of technology in our concept.
Our concept was also driven by exercises in finding cultural rituals, which we eventually referenced the Doljabi from.
Our project evolved a lot over the course of the project’s development. We began thinking about how to have an ongoing conversation with ChatGPT, and decided on a CYOA mystical story-writing concept. However, after realizing the back-and-forth aspect of ChatGPT was technically out of scope for the project, we thought about how to scale back. Eventually, we landed on our current project state which is a “subverting-career-future-storytelling” device. Although a lot changed in the process, we retained: using ChatGPT in a madlibs prompt fashion and using color sensing to “magically” encode arbitrary tokens.
We also learned a lot through the technical development and making process. At first we thought the color sensor would be far more sensitive and so it was recommended we added a button to control the ON/OFF state of the color sensor so it wasn’t constantly reading. However, we realized that within our controlled box environment, the color sensor could be trained really accurately and there was no need for a color sensor.
Another notable technical challenge we encountered was with the printer printing dull pieces. After some research, we found the solution of switching from a 5v to 9v power source.
We received a lot of meaningful feedback from the guest crits.
One interesting comment we received from Mary-Lou was about using our project to make users question or uncomfortable. We had found accidentally that although our prompt purposely uses neutral adjectives, it generally evokes optimistic responses. Looking at the form of our project, however, as this machine that spits out fortunes upon a tangible activation, it would be interesting to think of it almost as a “gamble”. Mary-Lou brought up the question of making our machine almost “addictive”, something that users would get an adrenaline rush from using. Therefore, a more unpredictable and provoking nature to the responses would be an interesting future exploration.
Sinan also commented to the entire class about “how your project gets there” which is an interesting thought. We could definitely play around with the context our machine exists in, and draw out a user journey that’s much more expanded in scale — considering how a user first “stumbles upon” our artifact.
We definitely had to kill a few darlings along the way, but our project worked really well in the way that it worked just well enough for us to demonstrate it smoothly and get meaningful feedback on it. By crit day, we weren’t able to connect our the color sensor to ChatGPT, so we wizard of oz’d the prompt to match the chosen token. However, this didn’t interfere with the user experience. We were also able to troubleshoot smaller problems that had a large impact by the end, such as printing out more saturated receipt slips, and adjusting the placement of the strip printing to be more ergonomic.
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