Bowei
UXD
IxD
About
Virtual Kinship
CONNECTING
The development of contemporary kinship
In the last project, we discussed the lack of elderly care services and tried to alleviate using “Ambient Assisted Living”. Nevertheless, the deeper reason that causes this problem was never set foot on - the collapse of the traditional family. Since the mid-1960s, the family in Germany - like in other highly developed industrial societies, has undergone pronounced change processes. Many social scientists believe that marriage and family are going through a crisis; there is even occasional talk of the “death of the family”. Childlessness, single-parent family, and ageing population, the collapse of traditional family form has caused series of social problems and financial crisis; more children and adolescents no longer grow up during their entire childhood and adolescence with both birth parents.
So, in this inevitable trend, what impact will the new generation of digital and interaction design have on developing relationships between individuals?
The Connecting
The rise of social networking has shown that virtualization is an important way to build connections in the future. Making virtual relationships more natural through more semantic means of interaction is the main innovation of this product. The Connecting is a wearable connectivity platform that enables a direct virtual relationship between two individuals in any location.
Characterisation
In the CONNECTING platform, users automatically create their own personalized personas. Through the information collected by the bracelet sensors, the virtual character with a unique personality would be created to interact. To protect the user's privacy, the virtual persona can only present three basic simulated states.
Idle state
The normal state - the user can interact with the character normally.
Active state
The state shows the target is busy and not be able to interact.
Sleepy state
The state shows target is hoping to interact with the user.
Intimate Communication
The Connecting bracelet offers a unique direct interaction method. Touch the bracelet anywhere, anytime, and the close to skin haptic sensors will instantly simulate real touch to create a space-independent interaction experience.
Measurable kinship
It quantifies unfathomable communication while ensuring privacy and provides at-a-glance relationship charts while optimizing kinship through big data calculations.
Flexible compatibility
It also contains the smartphone version with full access, for most flexibilities in different scenarios.
Process I. Conceptual Idea
The utopian family form
The decline of legitimate marriage institution is inevitable, in view of the ongoing social shift, does the modern family form still have a future? which alternative forms of family and relationships are most compatible with the processes of social change and can possibly replace the modern small family?
The key prerequisite for replacing the traditional family model, therefore, is whether children and adolescents can grow up psychological and physical healthily without a family environment or in a extraordinary family environment (such as single-parent family, stepfamily), and can the new form of social structure provide reliable social support for the elderly who living alone or without kins.
process II. Tangible Design
Wearable kinship
Improve the interaction logic of the product according to various design methods such as persona and scenario, and consider the technical requirements together with the details to meet the project concept as much as possible within the framework of technology.
process III. Technical Implementation
Character with unique personality
Using the latest SwiftUI framework and Spritkit framework, combined with motion design, hundreds of character animations were created and graded according to their characteristics in order to create virtual characters with unique personalities.
Source code
The epistemology of interactive design
What is an ideal alternative form to the contemporary family institution? There is no certain answer. But here is a possible direction, by the symbiosis of human and machines, the shifts of family form in future and the communication between individuals can be replaced and progressed, with characterisation in a virtual world, the gender, races, and skin tone those stereotypical conditions would be eliminated.
In industrial design, the relationship between science, technology, and art has always been the core of the discussion. In the various periods experienced in history, the three have their own emphasis, and they have developed in completely different design directions, and have also exposed various drawbacks. Digitalisation and the emergence of digital products give us the first opportunity to fully integrate these three concepts. Digital applications are no longer limited to materials and processing techniques. In interface design's epistemology, the disputes between art, technology, and science are settled here. They should not be distinguished from each other and integrate and efficiently achieve the conceptual idea.
the documentation with complete research and processes