My Goal as a Designer:With each product or concept that I design, I strive to create a unique experience that pushes an individual to break out of the societal mold.  The societal mold has been constructed by people like ourselves who find comfort in following norms and not straying from the artificially created line of action. This causes people to adopt a preventative mindset, which promotes risk aversion and allows for a closed mindset in regards to any unique opportunities that may be uncomfortable because they deviate from the norm.  This preventative mindset also promotes mindlessness, because it instils fear to conform to the masses.  I want to design products that make people think twice about societal rules-products that promote a promotional mindset, and enable mindfulness.  I want my products to make people feel comfortable with deviating from the norm.   I tried to illustrate this goal with the photo above.  I typed "unlike the rest" into google images search, and the underlying picture of the green apples with the one red apple appeared.  Starting with this photo, I began to experiment with all the different tools on photoshop.  By keeping the red apple in focus, I blurred and swirled the green apples to represent the chaos in society, and how it can be hard to maintain the position of uniqueness through all the chaos. The color scheme of the entire picture is meaningful, as well.  For example, the color unlike any color in the photo is the red, which is in the middle. As you work your way out of the center, you reach the green from the surrounding green apples. This position in the green is very close to achieving differentiation, but has not quite reached optimal position.  As one moves away from the red and green, they hit white and silver.  These colors represent people who are content with where they are in their lives and who blindly accept societal norms.  I mixed the harsh colors of black and green together and placed them as a ring around the designed photo in order to capture and display aesthetically the pressure that society puts on people to conform and accept the norms.  Through all of this chaos and pressure, the optimal point is where the red apple is.  I tried to also appeal to Desmet and Hekkert’s article on design by creating an interesting aesthetic experience, which then transfers to a meaningful experience which elicits a strong emotional experience.  Challenges/What I’ve GotChallenge 0: My sphere full of multicolored paper clips touched on the idea of chaos mentioned above, but in regards to emotional experience.  There was also certain aesthetic experience through the touching and mingling of all the different colors inside the clear plastic sphere.Challenge Half:Disco Shower was meant to appeal to many different senses, therefore transforming a supposedly normal, every day activity into an unusual, yet extremely fun experience. Many people normally don’t think twice about showering-it is practical and necessary.  However, this product pushes people to question an action that they have been doing all their lives, in the same manner.  Disco Shower does have aesthetic appeal through the strobe lights of the shower head matching the beat of the music, but it mainly focuses on the emotional experience of transforming a typical daily event to an exciting activity.  Challenge One:Vertical Reality is a product that is desirable because of its mystique and its requirement of imagination.  We created a poster with a color scheme and photo that were aesthetically mysterious, yet exciting, and we only included the most vital pieces of information.  Vertical Reality plays on the common fear of getting stuck in an elevator, which created an emotional experience that allows for the interaction between cognition and behavior, a crucial aspect of design as mentioned by Desmet and Hekkert. Challenge Two:Age is Just a Number was designed closely aligned to my goal as a designer. We wanted to break the mold of stereotypical beliefs regarding the socially constructed limits of older individuals in their golden years, specifically, a woman past her fifties.  Through this television show, we are giving the audience an opportunity to question widely held beliefs regarding the constructed limits of older individuals, and to be mindful and realize that "nothing holds more power to the body than the beliefs of the mind" (quote taken from our movie trailer).  This idea is desirable because of the implicit motivational meaning behind the theme of this television show.  What I’ve Got:My favorite, and personally most desirable and most meaningful, ‘What I’ve Got’ was the Coca Cola logo on its classic glass bottle.  The reason why this product is my favorite is because I feel as though there some magic aura surrounding Coke’s classic scripted white logo, because people across the globe know and love their products, and have been enjoying their products for decades.  The aesthetic design of the logo is so simple, so sleek, and elicits a strong emotional experience and quite possibly nostalgia of drinking Coke with friends and family.  

Challenge 7 – VeRg: Erging with Virtual RealityVeRg makes erging fun and exciting through the use of VRStaying fit and healthy is a problem for everyone who lacks the discipline and motivation to work out. Our product also makes working out more enjoyable and more productive for those who may possess that discipline and motivation, but who do not enjoy their time working out (66% of those we surveyed found cardio exercise at the gym boring, and almost 90% of respondents do other activities while using cardio equipment). We want to make that time more accessible and fun. The people we surveyed listed playing a game (23%) and following a course (26%) as additions that would add the most value to their cardio exercise experience, making these options worth pursuing. For more serious rowers, we simply want to make erging and training more exciting, more competitive (through racing), and, ideally, more productive. This improvement in productivity is an empirically proven possibility: according to a recent overview of VR exercise research, Huang et al. find that “VR feedback actually enables anaerobic exercise for longer duration by reducing perceived exertion.” More impressively, these studies were done on significantly outdated VR equipment; as such, any improvement on 2008-era devices would be greatly magnified by the massive improvements in VR technology since before the Oculus Kickstarter. Moreover, studies suggest that connecting realistic video of any sort to an erg workout – let alone a VR experience – would dramatically improve the productivity of the workout by simultaneously decreasing the user’s perceived exertion level and increasing his or her overall power output.Our research shows that serious rowers and casual couch potatoes alike find working out (and specifically erging) quite boring. Virtual reality is the solution. When empirically examining VR’s effect on people’s psychological reactions to exercise, researchers found that “VR coupled with exercise enhanced enjoyment and energy while reducing tiredness.” Solving this problem matters because everyone wants to be healthy; ideally, they are, particularly since being healthy correlates with being happy. As such, at the most foundational level, people want to want to exercise. Unfortunately, motivational constraints that are functions of the technical antiquity of current fitness products makes this goal difficult to realize.We are starting in the relatively niche area of indoor rowing to show how VR can be used to make training and working out fun (and to increase the amount of working out that people do). The success of this one product can be extrapolated to the other products in the fitness space, which could mix VR with treadmills, bikes, stair machines, etc. to allow users to operate those products in other built-out virtual worlds.GamificationOne explanation for why working out is so difficult is that it occurs well beneath BJ Fogg’s “Action Line” as described in his Behavior Model, particularly because exercising is often characterized by extremely low ‘ability’ (it is hard to do). Moreover, while in the long term many people may feel they are motivated to hit the gym, at any given moment in time their motivation is fairly low, particularly when compared to other less strenuous activities. To remedy this situation and get people who hate working out to the gym, we use the benefits of VR as described above to slightly increase users’ ability (to recap, VR makes working out feel easier). More importantly, we heavily boost users’ motivation to use cardio machines by making these experiences gamified and social, in the process making them more fun and more distracting. With higher motivation and ability, we can then activate users via social, competitive triggers such as invites to race. To gamify the VR experience, we are using an endless runner model of game in which the faster you row in real life, the faster you move your virtual boat and the more rapidly you can collect coins and therefore points. This model of game can be played for any period of time, which gives users the flexibility and freedom to workout at their own pace and for their desired duration. By introducing coins, we hope to further distract users from the pain of their work out and instead use the machine as a tool to help them more quickly rack up points and place higher on the leaderboard.To introduce as many triggers as possible, we also hope to capitalize on the ultra-important social aspect of working out (which our survey takers were quite interested in and is one of a few proven ways of getting people to the gym). Previously separated individual rowers will now be able to race each other — regardless of whether they are friends or strangers with a common desire to compete. Short of real-time competition, users can also augment the competitive nature of their experience by racing against a virtual pace boat (moving at the speed of a principal competitor like the Yale eight-man or your own personal record, for instance). Experience