Iteration 5.1 | Jack | Brainstorms, Biofeedback 🧠🌊


Iteration 5.1 | Brainstorms, Biofeedback 🧠🌊

Jack Duggan

We began by brainstorming about potentially controlling some sort of water feature with HRV. We talked about the possibility of manipulating flow, and using LEDs to enhance the experience. This conversation eventually evolved into the ocean, wave machines, and how the Ocean is a great metaphor for HRV in regards to emotional stability.

A stormy ocean, meant to symbolize stress - a common association with low HRV.

A serene ocean-scape, with fluid, calming waves. The opposite of above



Quite frankly, we were all awestruck when we watched this particular video.
We contemplated buying a smaller version a wave machine from Amazon or somewhere and retrofitting it for our purpose, but to be honest I'm not sold on that idea. I'd quite like to attempt building something like this ourselves and putting our own twist on it.

Another thing we discussed was ways to manually change our HRV, so we could actually see the waves change in real time. Breathing turned out to be the most realistic, which we expected. An interesting one was the discovery that alcohol can significantly affect one's HRV, lowering it by as much as 15% after just one drink.

Monday 15/04

Monday's class was basically a 2 hour brainstorm session. Jason took out the whiteboard markers and just started throwing our suggestions up on the board. We devised physical artifacts, discussed potential design pattern implementations, divided the workload and more.

The left side of the brainstorm whiteboard

The middle of the brainstorm whiteboard

The rightmost side of the brainstorm whiteboard.

As well as this, we discussed using WhatsApp to activate IFTTT, but decided against this due to security concerns.

I tried taking the absolute chaos that was the brainstorm board and converting it to a more readable 'poster'. To be honest, this wasn't my best work.



The Great Woodie's Escapade

On Wednesday 17/04, I was fed up of the library so went on a quick adventure up the Cork Road to Woodies. I didn't really go with a plan other than I wanted to look for things that could potentially be used as a housing for the wave machine. 

I was looking at boxes sure.. but I had a sneaking suspicion that such an item would be found more randomly; perhaps it would be a box something comes in, or an enclosure for some complete other purpose. 

As such, I kind of just roamed the aisles for half an hour, waiting for something to jump out at me.

I snapped a few photos of whatever looked kind of interesting, below are said photos.

Average Joe storage box.. shape and size not quite there.. not fully transparent. Price is nice though :)

Liked the size, transparency and minimalism. However, I feel the cylindrical shape will let it down.

Mason jar style bottle, don't really think this one's a contender. The long neck at the end will likely kill the momentum of our 'waves'. It's also glass which would add additional weight.

I think this is an organization drawer for a fridge (or at least that's what they're used for in my house). It's a nice shape, maybe slightly too short. It's also got a hefty problem, by means of the lack of one side...

It was probably my last find that I found the most interesting. It was a minimalistic, cuboid, acrylic container that's probably used for storing spaghetti, oats, cereal - that kind of craic. I doubt anyone has ever turned one into a wave machine, but I reckon it has a chance.

On its own it looks somewhat promising, if not a little uninteresting. The shape is good, but it's probably a bit too short. It's also got that lid on the top and narrows somewhat towards the bottom.


The real power I felt was putting two of them end to end. That gives the perfect shape, size and weight I believe (thanks to my mate Ziggy for modelling). 

The only real issues are the kind of obvious 'weld-like' section in the middle. There would additionally be the problem of actually sticking the two together in a way that is both watertight, and robust enough to endure the weight of 3-4L of liquid sloshing around inside.


The problem of sticking them together could perhaps be solved by creating some kind of connector piece to sit between them and then tightly supergluing both sides to the connector. You're then left with no way of filling it up... I'll bring the idea to the rest of the group and see if we can figure out something better.


With that all done, we went our separate ways for the final week of lectures, agreeing to meet up in the second week of May for a two-day lock in, where we would look to implement the ideas generated from this brainstorming session. 


For this, see my next blog, Iteration 5.2 | Lock-In

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