Week 5 Progress

Goals for this week:

• Continue prototyping

  • Illustrate more 2D scenes

  • Experiment with different styles of pop-ups

  • Experiment with paper circuits and integrating sensors such as LEDs and buttons

• Find users for testing page prototypes

We made more illustrations and constructed more pop-ups, adding in the story to get a feel for how it could be laid out.

When I was making the pop-ups, I realized that most of my designs would be the same as long as we continued transforming 2D illustrations to pop-ups: the illustrations would still look 2D but pop up with the page. This works for our prototypes with its simplicity but it may also be good to consider other forms of pop-ups, such as having only certain parts of illustrations pop up like Willie's head. Learning this will require going through tutorials more closely and understanding the concepts that would make these kind of pop-ups work while integrating paper circuits into them as well.

While constructing circuits, we noticed that some types of buttons, like the push button seen above, can be tricky to install with copper tape. There is also the question of how the sensors will be powered for each page, and in the case of buttons how could we prevent the button from being pressed when the page is closed so that it doesn't drain the battery's power? We'll likely be doing testing on this and maybe see if it is possible to build the circuit in such a way that it will only be able to function when the page is fully open, or whether this isn't possible with our current skills.

We're still waiting on our sponsor to get back to us about elementary school users to conduct HX tests with, so we'll most likely be doing these tests during the third round. For now our candidates for the next round of testing include children related to Annie, Ian Hales, and our friends.