itp-blog

Week 6

Scoping Down

It’s happening. My scope…it is decreasing.

I suppose the least painful way to decrease scope is to retain the essence of the original, lofty idea while cutting down on as many details as possible.

My midterm project will focus on UX/UI and Electronics 101.

As a proof-of-concept, I don’t think my midterm project will be useful for anything.

Minimal Midterm Project

Bill of Materials

• two protoboards of equal size
  • less than the width of a palm
• Arduino Nano 33 IoT
• monochrome OLED
• piezo buzzer
• LED
• 12 switches
  • these are buttons for text input
• whatever the case/shell is
  • I would love something soft and/or transparent

Use Cases

1. Being lost

   • I got lost at a would-be picnic with my friends in Central Park. I don’t have a phone with the capacity to connect to mobile hotspots. In the middle of the park, there is no WiFi. It took an hour to find my friends and have the picnic!

   • In this context, a pager would be useful for sending messages back and forth to share our location.

2. Being unhoused

   • I used to be part of a group that worked with unhoused people defending their living space against sweeps (evictions). A huge issue was communication. Unhoused people on the ground often couldn’t communicate with the outside world due to a lack of WiFi, electricity, and device supply.

3. Living without centralized infrastructure

   • Centralized infrastructure becomes less and less stable due to the acceleration of natural disasters and the proliferation of war zones.
   • How do we stay connected like this?
     • related: collapse informatics