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The Design Research in Personal Remote Communication​
​ --- Master's Thesis
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BACKGROUND
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The high population mobility and the development of communications Engineering, especially in the quarantine of COVID-19. Remote communication has become a regular lifestyle. Generally, remote communication includes remote cooperation and personal remote communication. However, no matter in the academic research or in the industry, people study remote cooperation more, which focuses on changing information itself. Because of the business value of remote cooperation and the complication of personal remote communication. One big part of personal remote communication is to share emotions, which fill in every detail of daily life. This thesis explores the design method for personal remote communication.
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Thesis
Presentation
USER RESEARCH
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According to cultural background study, the emotional expression of Chinese is very different from people of other cultural background. Influenced by Confucianism, the Chinese usually don't show their emotion openly by talking or facial expression. At the same time, family is a very corn concept in Chinese society. Therefore, the design should be very different from the existed communication tools, like the smartphone. The design research in this stage will focus on International Chinese students and their parents. They are typical users of personal remote communication: left home and live far away from home, but have a strong connection with parents or family members.
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This user research interviewed 10 Chinese international students, all from NYU. The user research mainly compared users daily life in the past, living with their family members, to the present life. It can help me find the missing parts which are important to express their care or love. The interview topics:
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The findings:
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1. Non-verbal communication is important in daily life
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2. The Companionship
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Ideation
Design principle
1. Including non-verbal communication
2.Including daily routine elements
3.Usability—easy to understand and use
Brainstorming
The brainstorming will consider the new design from two aspects: timeliness and the channel type. I use the coordinate axis to show the features of different ideas, the applications---Phone calls, Letters and Photo Albums are reference in the coordinate system :
Compared to these three, the redesigned cup is a good choice for this research. Because the cup is a necessity in daily life and everyone uses it every day. The interaction happens automatically, like sensing people’s presence and sending a signal. No entry threshold for people to use.No feedback is needed and no intense reminder in this design can make people less stressful for this kind of communication.
PROTOTYPING
The item related to a daily routine is a new view for designers to show the close link among family members. The cup is usually a private item, people use it to drink every day. Besides, in China, parents usually prepare water for their children or remind them to drink enough water every day even if they are far away from home. Parents’ care is expressed by this item and thus it is a symbolism of the natural connection between parents and children. The redesigned cup offers three user scenarios: in the first scenario, the cup can detect one side’s presence, then send this signal to the other side, and the cup of the other side will change its status to let he/she know. This status of presence gives them a feeling of companionship. In the second scenario, one side could see the cup change to the second status when the other side is lifting the cup and drinking water. In the third scenario, if one side wants to show how they miss the other side, he/she can rub the body of the cup and then water in the other side’s cup will vibrate to show this message.
The parts that will be used are: Microcontroller ESP8266, the thermistor module, the force sensor, the mini vibration motor; the Firebase will be used to save real-time data in the cloud.
As in the quarantine period, I build this cup model in the Rhino.
USER TEST
Research topics
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This research explores a new interactive way to enhance people’s emotional experience in personal remote communication. The prototyping redesigns the cup---an item in the daily routine. The user test pay attention to three topics:
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Whether the new type cup could be useful in the personal remote communication
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The understanding of the water vibration
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The environment variables
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For achieving the accurate data from this user test, the environment variables related to the characteristics of the test environments, such as the test environment is quiet or noisy, must be considered. Here four environment elements will be clarified in the test: female or male, parents or children, working or leisure time, users from other cultural backgrounds.
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This test will invite 16 Chinese people. Ten of them are students and the rest are parents.
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Half of the parent group and half of the children group will be female, the rest are male.
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The test environment will be divided into studying or working time and leisure time.
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The design is based on the cultural background of the Chinese. However, for exploring the usage extension of this design and finding out the difference of behavior patterns among different cultures. This test will also involve people from other countries: three people respectively from Brazil, America and Japan.
CONCLUSION
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Personal remote communication is very different from general remote communication, people’s emotional demand is obvious in this type of communication. According to the prior research in this thesis, the communication of close relationships largely builds on the interaction in daily life, and the way is not limited only to verbal communication. Especially for Chinese, nonverbal communication plays a very important role.
However, the current instant communication applications focus on creating dialogs between each other, leading something is missing in today’s personal remote communication compared to traditional personal communication. The thesis tries to make up the missing elements by redesigning the daily items people used--the private mugs when they lived with each other in the past. Because this research found that usually daily items attach to people’s memory or strong emotion, such as love and care, which can provoke emotional resonance deeply with each other.
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