After the dissertation, as I mentioned in a previous post, the last big task is to realise a final project related to the thesis, which will be exposed to the public in The Well Gallery at London College of Communication from the 6th till the 8th of November 2015.

After weeks of indecision on what to do for it, today I finally had a clear indication on what to do. However, the project it’s going to be way more complicated than expected, I hoped to create digital, probably an app connected to my thesis “saving energy saving through the use of gamification”, but everything was carrying me to a physical object and, in the end, the physical object it’s not even going to be a small one. I’m indeed going to build a human-sized hamster wheel.. Why? Because it makes sense.

My original idea was to create an app for a bike connected to a washing machine. This DIY technology is already known in some poor countries and also in eco-villages, however the idea was to add extrinsic rewards to that in order to engage a greater number of people and making the technology popular. According to my thesis a successful gamified system would have both extrinsic motivations (points, badges, leaderboards, etc.) and intrinsic motivations (desire to improve, challenge, mastery, control, etc.) and for this I believe that would have been ideal integrating some extrinsic rewards into a process that has some intrinsic motivations, such as the desire to do sport and get fit, the need/desire to wash the clothes, energy and money saving.
Furthermore, I thought specifically about a washing machine simply because it is one of the appliances in a household which consumes the most.

This idea however was discarded. It had no critical aspects and as my course leader put it, it didn’t fulfil the three elements forming my MA course name: Interaction – Design – Communication. It would have been and interaction design project, but poor on the level of communication (basically to understand the project people would have had to read my thesis). An gigantic hamster wheel instead would be full of meaning, it’s an iconic artefact showing how slave of technology we are.
Furthermore, I thought of connecting the wheel not to a washing machine, but to a phone charger. This would make things even more paradoxical and will also be more functional to the exhibition, indeed everyone will have a phone there (and everyone needs to charge its phone).

hamster_wheel_sketch