A week focused on Making

Working with the touch sensor last week was not on only interesting but it also gave me ideas on how I could make my project more immersive using it. I bought the MPR 121 and soldered it for the time first time which was very stressful. soldering is hard so I had to ask Andreas to help me with it. Since I had never used it before I started with very very basic skecthes and by understanding the different values that pop in the serial monitor and how different numbers can be connected and work. The first sketch was this very basic one where based on which wire I touched and the pressure I touch it with- the rectangles would increase and decrease in height.

After this worked I got the confidence to have multiple wires woorking at the same time and creating more sketches that are basic but still interactive and also have sound as part of them.

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Working on my Dissertation

Apart from working on the touch-sensor experiments, I also spent a good amount of time on the dissertation this week. To be honest, I’ve been feeling really conflicted about where I’m heading and whether things are aligning the way they should. The feedback I got during consultation made sense. Andreas said he could understand the direction of both my experiments and the dissertation, but there’s still something missing in how everything connects. The experiments themselves are not the problem but it’s more the stitching the part where I explain why these specific prototypes matter to the core question.

I also keep getting stuck between whether my project sits more in the Interactive Media Art space or the Interaction Design space. I thought I had it figured out around Week 7, but somewhere after that the edges started getting blurry again. This week I tried to reorganise sections of my dissertation, re-read some of the texts, and map out how the experiments actually support the argument I’m trying to make. It helped a bit, but I’m still circling around the missing piece. Moving into next week, I want to tighten the conceptual through-line, refine the rationale, and make sure I can explain the value of each experiment more clearly before the RPO.