Harry Solomons

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Week 1

This week, we began work on our brief for the UX of hair. In our brief initial discussions, we found a common interest in the ritualistic elements of haircuts, particularly in the ways they varied across gender, and decided to focus here for our research. As I was already shaving my beard for Halloween as well, I decided to share this on a video call with the group and preserve the hair for further research.

A clump of my beard hair
A strand of the hair under a microscope

For bodystorming, we decided to focus on the haircut aspect, as it made for an immediately accessible way to explore this idea of ritual, and so we put a wig and gown on each member of the group and cut the wig with trimmers and scissors. While doing so, we noticed a divide by gender among our reactions to the sounds of the haircut: Cristele, Weiting and Tanya had much more viscerally uncomfortable reactions to the sounds of trimmers and scissors than me or Romit. This led us to attempt to explore sounds further in our prototype.

Trimming Romit’s “hair”
We used the front-facing camera as a barbershop mirror stand-in

We also explored the haircut through our directed storytelling, asking two participants to talk about their most recent change in hairstyle. One had done so at home, the other in a salon – they had very different levels of comfort with the experience, with the salon-goer feeling much more at peace with the situation, but both mentioned a level of discomfort with the amount of physical touch to the head.

For our prototype, our idea was to mount hair on a part of the body normally hairless and very sensitive (the palm of the hand), and vibrate the hair in response to sound in order to highlight hair’s role in the auditory system. However, we were unable to get our Arduino microphone working in time, despite Weiting’s best efforts. Looking back, we had started constructing the prototype too late to do anything this ambitious, and should have committed to our idea earlier to give us a better chance of completing its development.

Rigging up the buzzer
Our first effort was too compressed
Migrating to a bigger glove

In the end, we instead implemented a button that would manually activate the buzzer when sound was heard. Unfortunately, I was ill and thus unable to attend the prototype demonstration, but the following feedback was relayed to me by the present members of the team:

  • The sound and touch elements were fairly disjointed
  • The vibration was more distracting than anything else
  • It was a restrictive experience for the rest of the class

We decided to change tack very heavily for next week, instead considering hair’s texture as a whole, referring to both its sound and its feel.