In the Lab, I am tracking the level of environmental light in bedroom and sound made by the sleeper. The aim is trying to find the connections or relations between factors and sleep quality.
However, serious scientific research on sleep or sleep quality (Polysomnography) is done by super precise observation and research, which is beyond what I can do.
So, instead of finding the REAL connection between sleep quality and factors, I decided to explore the mental and physical behavior of the sleeper, which I, as a sleep myself, couldn’t really observe what was happening with me when I’m sleeping since my eyes are shut and I was out of consciousness.
The subjective experience of sleeping usually is thought to be static, as one would found he or she is still in the same place and nothing changed after wake up. But actually, there is a lot going on.
Wether in REM or NREM sleep stages, sleeper will have actions (motion) or sound, which is physical and can be captured, like muscle moving without consciousness or control, sudden screaming or shouting, even sleep talking and sleep walking.
“This is the stage in which parasomnias such as night terrors nocturnal enuresis sleepwalking and somniloquy occur. “
Also, another fascinating thing happens during sleep is dreaming, the elusive first-person experiences that sleeper would have, and it could be told, as a “narrative” form. Another interesting fact is that people also try to read the dream after wake up, usually based on a rational sense interpreting it with logics.
Since, turning the sleep process into a more dynamic process in the subjective view of sleeper, I want the sleeping itself to interact with or create something. And this is where the following idea came from.
As I collected data about sleeping in Lab, I would like to use these data to produce a poem (creating something) which could be read as a similar as reading a dream.
And interesting thing is, dream is actually NOT narrative. It is many fragment of our memories, usually visual one, and as they appear in sleeper’s heads, the frontal part of brain will use logic to “read“ them as a rational narrative experience.
And it is quite similar to reading a poem that made from this project. people will try to connect elements that don’t have anything to do with each other, and build up a “logic”, to convince themselves, producing a whole image of what the poem “try to convey“.
The words (Concrete Nouns, Abstract Nouns,Transitive Verbs,Intransitive Verbs,Adjectives,Interjections ,Adverbs) and poem pattern/ style will be determined by the data collected, and I would try to make the poem somehow connected to the sleep quality or the factors that influenced sleep quality.
——– then I got comments or suggestion in class:
俳句 – Japanese traditional short poems
add user feedback
And beyond that, I really want to make it workable for multi-users, just like people can spend time together doing something even when they are not conscious.
Similar poem generator have offered the workflow sample.
——–
In the next week, things became more clearer.
I’m really obsessed about the similarity between dream interpretation and poetry reading, they both let readers create images based on the fragments.
Also, what I’m interesting about is to convert the void we experience during the night time (after you close your eyes you know nothing), into something that is sensible, physical, that kind of stand for the 1/3 lifetime we go through in bed.
And, one thing worthy to be aware of, is that this project aim to generate poems, which can be read and inspiring in the way similar to reading the dream. That’s why DREAM and POEM, are mixed, connected, associated in this project.
—————————-
Then, in order to bring the inspiration from daily life, rather than the online virtual content, it would be better to use elements from daily life to create the poem. And until now I have two ideas:
one is: type those words which come up to your mind before you go to sleep, like things you wanna dream about, the experience you had during the day, just randomly anytime in a day.
another is: randomly popped out request to ask user to choose word that fits (relatively) to their present mood/experience. This made the project seems to be working on a cell phone like an app, though I really don’t like it to be a digital experience.
—————————-
Another way to make this project more meaningful, more convincing, is to make the whole user experience ceremonial, like when people try to interoperate dreams they will try to find out the old, traditional believes about dreaming something.
So, for creating this ceremonial experience, and based on the idea to “substantialize” the dream experience, “substantialize ” user’s subconsciousness, the physical operation in this project and special way to view the poetry were introduced.
Want to user candle to heat up the paper, then the text could appear, which make it “physical”, physical things can be made, can be destroyed.
=================After the talk with Marisa, ideas I think can be further developed=======
- How to embed the whole experience into the real physical life? And this would be the key for this project, because I think the poem and dream is somehow make people to think about/ make reflections about the life.
- It would be good to take one of the daily routines, to combine it with the poem generating process.
- At the same time, don’t forget my original idea, to make it associated with dream/sleeping.
===============Coding / playable prototype=======================
An javascript/html script was made, to show the poem generating process and similar result.
Also, I got a bunches of libraries that can be cooperated into this project, like which can check if a word is one in the library, which can retrieve the meaning of a certain word from the dictionary, and which can tell wether a word is a verb, noun, or adjective word.
And for the basic coding prototype, I asked my friends test it, asking them about how do they think about the poem generated. A key issue generated which is users don’t feel the poem matters to them. So further step would be cooperate users data into the generating process, as I planed to do.
==================Visual/interface prototype===========
So, at this moment, a visual prototype emerges as the one showing in following images rendered with Solidworks.
It drew the idea of typewriter (which poem uses to write poems), and an alarm clock which somehow is the destination of one’s dreaming process, and a beginning of a new day. I think, at present moment, it seems echo with the idea of making poems and let users read it and get inspired from text.
As the model shows, the body was made of a keyboard which users can use to type key words that would be used to generate the poem, a clock shows time, two nobs at left side to adjust time and set an alarm clock, the pole that you can pull to enter sleeping mode(detect information/data to generate poems) and pull again to finish sleeping mode and mute the alarm while it will then start to print the poem.
*As the developing process went, I really want to make this typewriter look untechnical (make it like dumb technology). So wood/plastic, as Marisa suggested at the end, might be a good material according to this canon, rather than metal.
======================Some reflection from this project====================
I think I finally start to know how to make a prototype. Before, I thought making a prototype is just making something physically existingt there, rather than making a developing process/ different iterations. As for working practice, I’ll def try more developing different prototypes.
And for this project, the nearest next step would be make a prototype for mechanical system which would actually print something, and a full version of code.
