Second Iteration

We received a lot of feedback from our class demo, which lead us to reconsider the following design questions:

1) Have we considered time difference of long distance couples? How do we factor that into our design?

2) How might we design Plantr in a way that is intuitive for users to interact with? IoT devices should be intuitive to use with minimal user instructions. It required us to design affordances that are natural and straightforward to everyone. 

 3) Have we considered the context in which users interact with Plantr? Is it placed near the door for users to quickly interact with when they are going out, or is it on a desk or near a window which would afford a more intimate interaction requiring a user's full attention? 

With these questions in mind, we redesigned Plantr:

Users touch and caress the leaves of plant to indicate emotions. The touched leaf light up to indicate a happier mood. Multiple leaves brightening on the plant acts as a spectrum which indicates the intensity of emotion. We planned to have capacitive touch sensor and LED lights attached to each leaf of the plant, but we quickly ran into a challenge. We could only set the capacitive touch sensor into one state (either on or off to indicate high or low emotions) and users cannot turn it the other way around. This didn't meet our expected function of having users controlling the brightness to indicate emotions.