Assignment: Final Project 1: Progress Report

Collaborators: mcozzi

Final Project Proposal

We are planning on moving forward with the original Dayspace idea, but slightly modified.  We are interested in bringing the Dayspace visualization element closer to the taskblock interaction.  We will achieve this by merging the sandbox and display into an interactive table (see figure below).

By using a webcam & projector, we hope to take the visualization component and throw it onto the table.  We also want to explore the different shapes and visualizations on the table, (instead of sticking solely with bubbles).

We also brainstormed other features for DaySpace that need to be further developed that are listed below:

• Having the table display multiple days and trying to organize your time by fitting the blocks into confine space that represents one day.  This way, users can think of organizing their tasks like a puzzle. We want to remove the linearity of organizing tasks, and represent them in a spatial way.
• Representing constraints on organizing tasks. For example, if a user has an appointment from 1pm-2pm and another from 2pm-3pm, we want DaySpace to notify the user that s/he cannot complete the task that is 2 hours long in between those two appointments.

As stated in the original presentation, we need Dayspace because task management is hard.  Whether you’re the acting CEO of a large corporation or trying to stay on top of your classes, tasks are difficult to manage.  While there have been many attempts to do this, none of these approaches addresses the issue of time magnitude.  When task representations are fixed in size, it’s impossible to visualize the time commitment for each.  This is where Dayspace comes in.

List of materials:

Table

• Acrylic or plastic
• Vellum cover
• Projector
• Webcam
• RFID reader
• microprocessor

Taskblock

• RFID chip
• Mini text LCD display
• Microprocessor?
• Box enclosing. Thus might just be a plastic box