I took the lil’ Soundbox around the floor with me for user testing this weekend, but prior to that I got a pretty good demo of it in use. The mic does a pretty good job of picking up different kinds ofsounds from all around the room, and the light responds accordingly.
Close-up clap demo from Mike Dory on Vimeo.
What you can’t see there is that I’m running around the room, getting further away and closer up, but I did, and it works! There’s a longer demo if you want to watch that too:
Full demo from Mike Dory on Vimeo.
After messing with it a bit on my own, I gave it to a few other people to test out and see what they thought. I didn’t give much more explanation than “it’s listening, and it gets brighter when things around you are louder,” because I was hoping people would fill in their own ideas about how to use it beyond that. The results were both reassuring and highly amusing.
I gave it first to my friend and frequent collaborator Adam, who’s known a good deal about the process and prototyping, but hadn’t seen the finished version yet. Adam’s first reaction was “I like this. I want to take care of it — like a pet!” After messing around with the mic a bit, we went back to chatting. Every time he spoke, the light brightened — something that caught his eye, and brought volumes to his attention. As he noted, “it finds sounds that your brain normally filters out” which is also much like a pet. He then proceeded to speak to it like a tiny pet and hold it like one might hold a small dog or hamster, which was absolutely awesome.
He had a pile of excellent suggestions, mostly that it needs to have some sort of reaction at its peak beyond the light just being being really bright. He suggested having the box make a sound of its own, turn on a second light, vibrate — something along those lines that would call out that it was its limits. As he noted, “it has emergent behavior, but it has no opinion on it.” He’d also suggested, if I wanted to really push the pet aspects, that users could have some sort of input which would “calm it down” quicker after it hit peak, which is something I’ll have to try out if I make another more pet-ish version.
I gave it next to Tom Jenkins, who tested it out as follows:
Tom tests the prototype from Mike Dory on Vimeo.
I hoped people would find the design appealing, but I didn’t count on everyone turning it into a pet. That, I think, is a sign of success — if people like it enough that they can anthromorphize it on first use, then I’m hoping they’ll like it enough to keep using it for further testing.
Now, it’s out in public on the ITP floor:
At Kate Hartman’s urging, I put it out in the lounge to see how people would interpret the lil’ device. I haven’t put a video camera on it yet, but after two days of monitoring, it’s been getting a fair amount of attention. It’s done a pretty good job of relaying the volume level of the lounge (which during a typical ITP day goes from library-quiet in the early mornings to Grand-Central-at-rush-our insanity in the afternoons), and it’s gotten a bunch of people asking questions about it. I think it’s still too small and too impersonal to be of much use to anyone who hasn’t been given a 10-minute pitch about what it does, and even then it’s too far to actually be much good, but it’s certainly an assuring start.
Of course, this being ITP, it’s also getting attention from people who want to play with it. I’ve caught people running up to it and stomping, clapping, whistling, etc. People across the room have seen it blink and yelled to see it spike again. People have gone up to speak baby-talk into it and make sure it’s okay. To me, these are signs of success as well — people have to care about the object before I can expect them to learn much, and if they use it as a toy, they’re still augmenting the sounds they might otherwise not be paying attention to.
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