For user testing, I asked two of my friends to come in and try interacting with my piece. I have so far managed to bring everything together: 1) construct the box that would come to enclose the Arduino and whose surface would act as a canvas for the sketch to be projected on, 2) make the butterfly body out of printed laminated paper and attach the wings to the servos, 3) secure the butterfly atop the surface, and 4) attach two wires, shaped like butterfly antennas, beneath the wings to convey touch signals to the p5 sketch and activate the animation and the butterfly flutters. I knew that upon seeing the piece, users might not get the intuition to touch the butterfly. They also might shy away from touching it, out of fear of ruining the butterfly’s delicate structure, or assume that some other automatic process would have to trigger the movement of the piece. To counter that, I will be displaying a name next to my piece that indicates, but does not outright reveal, that a touch signal is necessary. I have not yet settled on a name, but have told my two friends that it would be called “catch a butterfly” or “pet a butterfly” and they immediately figured out that they had to use their hands in some way. I placed the antennas facing them so that they were more likely to come into contact with them and I was glad that they did end up placing their touch close enough to the wires for the signal to be captured.
They both loved seeing the butterfly in action, but gave the following feedback, which was mainly focused on the sketch itself:
- add different colors to the butterflies in the sketch
- experiment with different movement paths for the projected butterflies (inward movement from outside the sketch bounds or having multiple center points for their emergence, for example) or smoothen/slow down their movement.
I expected the feedback I got from them, as I have been planning to implement those two features after I had the basic version of the project implemented. I will be working on that over the next couple of days, as well as decorating the surface some more (adding flowers to cover the base of the servos and on different parts of the surface).