- Yeah, so as explained already,
I'm gonna talk about the work we did in collaboration
with the museum.
So we created and deployed an exhibit inside the museum,
and today I'm gonna talk to you about the design process
and design rationale used as scope of this work.
So the work was done in collaboration with the museum
and so as the author team, and together with my colleague
which is called Christian Moll and Joao Martins
from the museum.
Yeah, so first, little bit about the context.
So the Tudor Museum, it's a very small museum
which is located in Rosport, which is a small village
that's right in the border to Germany and Luxembourg.
And while here you see an image of the museum
so it's the original house of Henri Tudor.
And the ideas inside the museum
to show a little bit about the life of Henri Tudor,
so Henri Tudor is an inventor,
to show about his life, to explain how he lived,
and what led to the invention of the battery at that time.
It's 300 square meters,
and it started off with more traditional exhibits
like old batteries and old battery plates and so on,
but then moved progressively more to,
more interactive exhibits.
So you see a few pictures there.
In the middle, the picture shows that one idea
also in the museum is to recreate a little bit,
the atmosphere of that time.
So to have, I don't know, when you enter the first room,
it's very dark so that the visitors experience
how it felt at that time when you didn't have electricity
and when you had to work with oil lamps and candles.
And here on the right, you see one of the room
which is more an experiment room
where school classes can come,
and they can do different types of experiments
with electricity to understand the science
behind electricity.
So it seems it's not that central in Luxembourg city.
The number of visitors are also not that high
as compared to maybe, I don't know,
Boston Science Museum or something.
So they have 700 visitors per year, for instance,
and 120 guided visits.
So it's not necessarily that every day
there is one visitor also,
just to give you a little bit the context.
Yeah, now about Henri Tudor.
So, he's a Luxembourgish inventor,
and what he did, he did not invent the battery itself,
but he made the battery ready to use.
So before there were already people
who managed to show that it could have a capacity
on the battery, but their approaches,
it's either the problem was that the capacity
was very low or they took a year to be ready to use,
so it took a year of forming the battery
until it was ready to use, or they broke
after two weeks when they were ready to use.
So Henri Tudor, he proposed a design
of the plates, what you see there,
so he created some groove inside the plates,
and this then allowed to increase the surface
of the plates, and with this,
so the capacity could increase.
And the second thing he did
is that to reduce the forming time,
actually, well when forming the battery,
you have to thicken the layers on the plates,
but this takes up to a year.
So one inventor proposed already to put some kind of paste
like lead oxide directly from the beginning,
and this reduced incredibly the time,
it was only more four weeks, but then this fell off,
so what he proposed was to form a little bit
at the beginning and then put this additional paste
onto it, so it was like a new process
and with this process then the battery lasts 20 years
or something.
Yeah, so this was a core idea,
I mean, the museum is about Henri Tudor,
so we have to explain to visitors this idea,
although it's a bit complex, and previously,
this was done in this exhibit.
So, yeah, basic concept is that you contrast the invention
of Henri Tudor with previous inventors,
and then you see with some graphs
how the capacity is increasing
and how it is decreasing again because it's breaking.
And you can have series of drawers and you can take them out
and you see how the plates would look like.
So the layers of increase already thickened or not,
and did they break or not.
So when you wanted to look at it,
you first have to read very carefully what's happening,
and then if you open the drawers,
you have to look from the sides.
And while usually you open one or two drawers and then,
okay, I basically audit and then visitors, they moved on,
so it was not really engaging.
It was a bit difficult also to understand
because you could not compare two different drawers.
So the museum manager was really not happy with it
and, well, he called it the monster.
And they came up this idea of making this more interactive,
more engaging, and more comprehensible.
So we talked and we came up with this idea
of the project and...
Yeah, we set up series of goals.
So we want to support a learning-by-doing approach.
It should allow the visitor to experience the atmosphere of,
and tools of the time of Tudor.
It should be easy to use and to apprehend.
The exhibit should be engaging.
It should address small groups of visitors,
because either they have individual visitors
or they have larger guided visits,
so it should be suitable for both types of groups.
And then for the learning goals, it should be,
it's quite complex, but at least visitor
should understand which component they need
to create a battery, and how this can be used
to increase the capacity, the forming time and lifetime,
and then also understand
what process exactly Henri Tudor proposes.
So when we thought about this, our first idea
was why not using a tabletop, because, I mean,
we have seen many examples in museums
where tabletops are used and quite engaging
and collaborative and so on.
But then we thought that the problem is if you want
to really show this, how it felt in the time
of Henri Tudor and the tools and the equipment
they are using, then it might not be that well suited.
So we thought that it's maybe better
to think about a custom design, a custom space,
with custom objects.
And so we discarded a little bit the idea of a tabletop,
and yeah, we started an iterative design process
with several prototypes,
and this is the first prototype we did.
So we started to think about a workbench
instead of a tabletop,
which then would look like the tools
Henri Tudor are using, was using.
So in this first iteration of the design process, we,
this was the result, so we said
we are using four main components.
So the workbench, an interactive notebook
where you could check what the different components are,
a battery casing where you could compose different types
of batteries and then to see how the capacity
and so on is changing graph paper,
because that was also the only thing we could think about,
what is appropriate for the time.
Then we tested this workbench and, to see what happens
if there are 20 people standing there,
what happens if there are four people standing there,
so we tested this in our small group,
and just putting ourselves on different positions,
and then we said it's better to have a straight workplace
because like a T-table or something,
then it's always a lot of people
who are not really seeing the screens.
So we decided for a straight workspace,
and we put all the screens at an angle,
so then you can see them from many distances.
And then in the next iteration,
we created a functional prototype,
so we bought material, and to see how it's working,
what sizes are appropriate, and one core component
is the transparent screen, so we used transparent screen
because then we can actually insert the plates
and we can add some effects, so some kind
of augmented reality approach.
But then was the question, how can we track these plates,
that they are really reliably detected, so we worked,
decided to work with RFID, but we had to test where exactly
to position them so that everything is well detected.
So that was a little bit the purpose of this iteration.
So then we decided to keep it all pretty simple,
or try to simplify it as much as possible
and we decided to use three inputs
and three outputs for the model
which was approximately the simplest we could think about
to nevertheless deal with the material we had to,
and then we decided to base all the physical manipulations
on inserting objects into the casing, because,
I mean if you think about how can you make interactions
as realistic as possible,
it would mean I have to open a bottle
or even with this paste, I would need some kind of,
I don't know, brush, to put it on it,
but all this would get so complex
because there are so many different actions to do,
that at the end, we said we just add everything
in the casing, so plate in the casing.
If you want to add the paste,
you put a small wrapped thing next to it,
and also the bottle is put in the casing.
So, then based on this,
it all became a bit more clearer and consistent.
So then we thought about effects,
how they could be shown, so with graph paper
to show the curves, how they are increasing, decreasing
and what could be shown on the screen,
on the transparent screen in the casing.
And the workflow then is basically three steps.
Insert components, form or use the battery,
and then view the results of the graph paper.
Yeah, and then the set up in the museum,
so then we went to the museum
and we worked many long days in the museum.
We laser cut the battery casing,
inserted everything more high-fidelity way,
added RFID antennas.
With the transparent screen, it was also important
to work with a good light so we put some light,
LED strips on top of it, the white thing,
what you see, and then we decided
to put the wheel to turn, because otherwise,
I mean you need to, for one test, you need to pass 52 weeks.
So if you want to push 52 weeks times on the bottom,
it's getting really long for one experiment,
so we decided to use some kind of wheel.
Yeah, and then the decisions we took
as part of this iteration, so the exact shape
of the objects so that they look really from the time
of Henri Tudor, so these old chemistry bottles,
we created some plates, which also should look
as most like the real plates, and yeah,
some pictures also to be used as part of the book.
And then we created the visualizations like you see here
where the protons and the electrons are moving.
And then in addition, the problem we faced then
is that it still seemed quite difficult to use
or to really do the real, the right procedure,
so we added some feedback messages of Henri Tudor.
So each time a visitor is doing a manipulation,
he gets a feedback.
Here, for instance, Henri Tudor is saying,
"Incredible, the lead oxide
"is shortening the formation time a lot."
So we meant to do it also a bit funny,
it is why we done it that way.
Yeah, and that's now how the final prototype
then looked like, how you can operate the books,
get information.
That's the casing, so you can add the plates,
and the electrolyte, and then you see the level increasing,
and then you can form and you see the protons
and the electrons moving.
And here you see the capacity increasing.
And also the lifetime, so for how long,
does it break again and goes down very quickly,
or does it keep for quite a long time?
With regard to the conclusions,
so what can we learn about this?
So first of all, the prototype, we did it,
the order, exhibit, we did it in multiple iterations,
and actually, each and for iteration,
we used a different type of prototype, and this allowed us
to address different aspects also of the design,
so the first was more about the spatial configuration
and for the type of groups we are targeting.
The second was about the model and the interactions.
So to simplify it and to make coherent interactions.
And the third about the form the feedback,
so how exactly do, what shape do they show
and what kind of atmosphere do they reflect.
With our custom spatial configuration
and the tangible interactions,
we could so address multiple types of groups,
we could create a more realistic setting
and we could support engagement and learning by doing.
The concrete interactions to handle a complex topic,
they provided some additional usability challenges
because it was so diverse that it would be impossible
to find everything out by themselves.
And we proposed to address these challenges
by simplifying the model, making interactions coherent
and adding feedback messages.
So, that's it, right on time, I'm really proud.
(audience laughing)
- [Man] Let's thank (audience applause drowns out speech)
So we've got time for some questions.
Anybody in the audience?
Raymond, come in front here.
- [Man] Sorry about that.
- [Man] I have to try flying first.
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Man] Nice work and have you already deployed it
in the museum, maybe I missed that?
- Yes, it's already deployed.
So it was deployed in the third iteration,
so we deployed it and then we improved it slightly
based on some observations we made.
- [Man] Okay, and, but you haven't yet collected
some user feedback from the--
- We have collected a lot of data, mostly logging data,
so we added some logging information
about how long they interact with the exhibit,
what kind of interaction they do.
As much as we could log, and we provided a questionnaire
which visitors can then fill out at the end,
which checks little bit what they know
about Henri Tudor and the battery.
No, only the batteries, sorry, and the user experience,
the (mumbles) but it's all in the lab and not yet evaluated,
so hopefully it's something for next year. (chuckles)
- [Man] Hi, I'm (mumbles) this is just great work.
I just wanted to congratulate.
Actually, I don't have a question.
I only wanted to say this is really great work
and I especially liked your iterative design process,
and the outcome, and also the idea
of not using tabletop, I love that.
It's very, I shouldn't say it aloud here,
but it's really great.
No, to distribute, actually, I mean to distribute the action
in physical and tangible objects, and the centerpiece alone
is really a brilliant piece,
not just of (mumbles) but also it's really attractive
as an interaction object so I think
it was a great design decision to still have a surface
with all these objects which look a little bit like the time
and still have it interactive, so it's a multi,
actually it's a multi-display environment.
There's different input modalities,
so therefore it's really great work
and congratulations on that.
- Thank you.
- [Man] Any other questions?
I'll ask one question while the next speaker sets up,
if you can.
Oh, sorry, Ed? - Yeah.
- [Man] I'm sorry, I missed it.
- [Man] Oh, okay, Edward C, Unitech.
I really like the simulation aspect of this, of this work.
It was really great, and I was wondering
if there were different configurations
that people could try to see
what would get the optimal battery.
Was it like a little game for them to play
to get the most powerful battery?
- Yes, this was actually also something
with the first observations of the museum,
we realized that it was not clear enough.
People need a clear task, otherwise they are confused
and they don't know what to do, and the clear task
is actually to recreate the invention of Henri Tudor,
so how does the, how to get a battery
with a short formation time but a long lifetime.
So it's still pretty complex, but that's his invention,
so they, each time they get feedback
from Henri Tudor with regard to this.
So for instance, if you put the wrong electrolyte,
he says, "I'm not sure this is gonna work,"
or something like this, so really to help the visitor
get him towards this goal.
- [Man] That's a really great simulation environment
and it's a great way of learning,
so thank you for doing this, great job.
- [Man] Okay, let's thank Valerie again.
(audience applauding)