I purchased everything that needed to be ordered online, leaving only materials for structural elements to be purchased.
As of 1/15 I have used approx. $135 of my $250 budget. Because I am a prime member, most of my order will arrive on the day I ordered it.
NOTE: My parts from amazon all arrived, and due to some changes in the project, I do not need some of them. Time to ship them back!
After a very constructive talk with my mentor Danny, I have a revised plan for a userbase, construction, and operation. The following paragraphs breaks down each section of my revised plan
Userbase
My initial thoughts for Cubit were as follows: use publicly located smart lockers to facilitate second-hand commerce. My revised plan uses a similar approach for facilitating the sharing of goods and across the student body. A single designed box will appear somewhere on campus. Any student curious enough about the box can find a phone number on the box. Texting or calling that number will provide them with instructions. Ideally this box will travel around campus. Ideally this box will receive advertising from official university channels.
Construction
With box transparency no longer important, my creativity can shine in the design and construction of the box itself. I plan to make it reminiscent of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It will provoke interaction without demanding it. Its lack affordances will incite attention. It will be a mystery and a secret. An easter egg of campus. My initial thoughts are something that looks like a perfectly smooth and symmetrical rectangular prism. No handles, no buttons, nothing but a phone number scrawled into its surface. Using the box will mean solving a wordless riddle. Construction will be done using a frame of structural lumber, surrounded by a featureless shell, and containing a shell that hides the structure.
As per my conversation with Mr. Ranking, branding has become less important. The box will be its own brand. It will take on an identity of itself. Like the HAL-9000 of the same movie, the box will have a name of its own. Something reminiscent of the simple technology partners of today, such as the aptly named Samsung Bixby or Apple’s Siri.
Long story short a name is TBD.
Operation
Students can use this box to stow items for other students to retrieve. This will work via the following process illustrated below:
Synopsis: 1. A user texts the number found on the box. They receive in reply, instructions to operate the box. If the box is in being used, they learn when the current operation expires.
2. The user uses the OPEN command through SMS and the box opens. Upon closing it with goods to be exchanged inside, the box sends a request for information message. It wants a recipient’s phone number
3. The box sends instructions and a photo of the goods (taken by the box’s internal camera) to the recipient, along with a date-time by which they must retrieve the item(s) or forfeit them
4. The recipient sends an OPEN message to the box’s number which opens the box. The recipient can take the item(s) and the interaction has ended. UPDATE: The recipient has a unique code generated by the box that only the depositor and recipient share. That will counteract previous box users from opening it for mischief while in operation.
These steps are accomplished by using cloud stored functions and mobile-cloud messaging services like Twilio. When a message is sent to the box, it triggers an action from a cloud based function. This action could be the response of another message, or it could be the opening of the box itself.
Concerns
The box can be thought of as a physical dead-drop and could attract some unwanted attention from wrong-doers. This project will be a good testing ground to see what the results of a free to use secure space will be.
While the possibilities of vandalism and misuse still exist, on this smaller userbase scale, the severity is greatly reduced. Plus the vandalism itself becomes as useful a product of the design as the utility itself. In this great dead-drop experiment any interaction, good or bad contributes to results.
It is possible that some effort by myself will have to go into policing the use of the box in the early days of its use. But the results of this shared space experiment could prove both fascinating and useful insights into developing a more meaningful box.
Weekly Time Management
Goals from last Week
Talk with Danny about project changes – 1 hour
(used the hour)
Develop new user profile – 2 hours
Develop new branding identity – 1 hour
Design new aesthetic – 3 hours
Think of marketing materials/videos – 1 hour
(the above 4 became the same sort of problem to solve and probably took ~5 hours to plan out)
Shopping – 3 hours
(1 hour of amazon working/fighting)
I am ecstatic because I finally have the exact direction this project will be going. Everything has become concrete and just requires execution. I would say the planning stage is for all intents and purposes wrapped up. Now I can enter hardware mode!
ATLS Capstone 