Assignment: Midterm Project 1: Group project proposal

Collaborators: Dan

Assignment: Midterm Project 1: Group project proposal
Collaborators: Marco Cozzi &  Dan Byler

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Dan Byler, Marco Cozzi

Midterm Project Proposal

“Dayspace”

The Problem

People today are busier than ever before. Tackling lengthy to-do lists can be a serious problem for individuals with poor time-management skills. Compounding the problem is the difficulty in visualizing time commitments associated with disparate task.

For instance, consider a typical to-do list: Finish proposal; Get haircut; Send results to Bob; Cook dinner; Meet with project team. Although each item in this list occupies the same space (a single line), in reality, they represent very different time commitments. For example, finishing the proposal may take much longer than any of the other items—yet this is not obvious upon casual glance.

In summary, the problems we seek to address are twofold: difficulty visualizing/intuitively understanding relative task times; and difficulty adjusting time commitments within the confines of a day.

Our Idea: Dayspace

We propose creating a tool to help users easily visualize task times and adjust their commitments within a given day. This will be achieved through two main components: a physical “sandbox” and a virtual “Dayspace”.

In the physical realm, the user will interact with “TaskBlocks”, which are cubes that represent specific to-do items, and a “sandbox”, which represents the user’s day. Each TaskBlock will be uniform in shape and size, analogous to their similar appearance on the user’s to-do list. Placing a TaskBlock in the sandbox represents a user’s commitment to performing the task.

The Dayspace is a screen that displays a visual representation of the user’s available time in one day. When a TaskBlock is placed in the physical sandbox, a virtual time-block will appear in the user’s Dayspace. Likewise, when a TaskBlock is removed from the sandbox, it disappears from the Dayspace. This illustrates the tight relationship between the tight coupling between the physical TaskBlock and the virtual time-block in the Dayspace.

In the Dayspace, virtual time-blocks will be sized relative to the time-commitment, e.g., a two-hour task would be twice as large as a one-hour task. This will help the user visualize how much time must be spent on each task. Furthermore, because the user can physically pick up and set down TaskBlocks in the sandbox, he or she can easily and tangibly control different permutations of the day.