interacting...

movie showing user interacting with the switch, and its visual response.

testing out the switch and visual response

This is just one of the possible way for setup.

* picture was taken when testing out the switch and the visual response.

final switch design

This switch plays on the idea of weight and balancing.
However, it has simply but effective function mode.
The user can tilt to the left to activate left button, tilt to the right to activate right button, or keep the balls all spread out to deactivate both buttons.

Movie for year 1960

"Bridging the gender gap". This is a serious topic, but in order for the audience to easily understand the story, I decided to re-tell the story in a fun, and not so serious way, therefore the movie that I've made will show them the story in a way as if they are reading a digital comic book.

I think that by re-telling the story in such a way will be more interesting than showing the audience real life historical images, as they can be more graphically attracted to the comic style, especially for children.

switch design development

have two buttons: left and right
press down on the hand print to tilt it left or right

visual development

concept idea 3

a game for user to play. User will increase or decrease the pay rate for men or women by tilting the switch to left or right, and the year will increase and decrease accordingly. The idea is to get the pay rate for both men and women to equal. Once the pay rate is equal, a video will pops up, showing the user the story on this particular topic.

switch control:

tilt to left = increase woman's pay

tilt to right = increase man's pay

more quartz experiments

Moving at Y axis

left click : move up
right click : move down
the max and min value is set so that the house can only move within a certain range.






Counting numbers

left click : increase number by 1
right click : reset to 0

Problem/Things need consideration

1) the reset button

2) how to make 1960 more appealing so that the user won't confuse the year of the story that I'm retelling

3) needs more graphical images/animations

4) some other way to hold the switch instead of hanging from the ceiling

modified concept

I see that this story talks about balance and equality, and so I'll be including these value in my re-tell of this story.


Switch Design

So in my switch design, it is basically a metal ball inside a transparent container, and this switch plays on the whole concept of balance. The idea is to try to apply equal amount of pressure on both side to get the ball to balance at the center of the container. Once the metal ball is at the center, it closes the circuit, and the switch is then switch on.

Screen Design



I have a short video here showing the intended visual outputs, and how the switch controls/ work with the visual. So the lower part shows the movement of the switch, and the upper part shows the visual respond accordingly. On both side is graphical image representing home and workforce. When the switch is on, the year begin to counts and there are small icons that represents woman going from home to workforce, suggesting that more women come out from home and step into the working field.

Once the ball is off center, it pauses the whole thing. And when it comes back to the center, the visual display will continues from where it left off.

When the year count reaches year like 1939, 1960, 1972, which has specific event occurs on that particular year, it will zooms in, to show images, text or video on the story happened. When it finished, it will just zoom back out, and continue to count the year until the next one.

Space Set-up



It's gonna have a screen on the wall, and the switch is right infront of the screen, a distance away, and hanging down from the ceiling to about waist level of an adult.

initial concept

the switch is going to be a built up wall that people can punch on, and the screen will display images of woman changing through the history. Every time the "wall" get punched, the image that was showing on the screen breaks apart, and resemble to an image of more recent year. This represents the user is breaking the "wall" between man and woman, and bring them one step further to equality.


Quartz experimenting on wall breaking apart:

Project1: re-telling tale

year chosen : 1960
story title : Bridging the gender gap

summary of the story:
This story talks about the unfair treatment between male and female in New Zealand history. It says that in the 19th century women were not expected to work in paid jobs because their place was in the home. There's where they belong. Even if some women do work, they will be paid less than men. However in 1960, women made up almost one-third of the workforce, and legislation has recognized this unfair treatment and gives women in public sector the same pay as men for the same work. And then in 1972, the government has further refined the legislation, giving women in both public and private sector equal pay.

Some Quartz experiments

Tutorial 1






My first Quartz exp