- State of the art draft.
- In this chapter I will go look though all possible implementations of Sociometric Badge. Before building the realistic solution for this project I need to chop through the Sociometric Badge into several basic principles that will be benefit the target group. Each of these principles will related to whom are this project are meant to. The main target of this project is to create a basic tool that help social scientists to leverage their social experiment, similar to the Sociometric Badge. The hypothetical basic tool mentioned is supposed to carry out only the fundamental functionalities of the Sociometric Badge. From this most basic implementation, the users can then can apply their own requirements to create their own ideal tool that suit their own needs. Specifically for this project, the users will be the social scientists who will be greatly helped to have such a tool like Sociometric Badge and the makers who will help social scientist to build and tweak the tool.
- The main principles for Sociometric Badge as from the social scientists perspective are the usability. The main consideration for social scientists to have Sociometric Badge, is that they cannot find the perfect fit out of it. In ideal scenario, let say, when everyone has the same capability, there would be tools similar to Sociometric Badge fitted with with their own requirements for any possible needs. This project sets to create an alternative version to Sociometric Badge that shares the basic usabilities for any given cases so far. So, in order to know what kind of propositions are necessary to satisfy most of social scientists, the qualities that this project search for state of the art are the inputs, what are the promoted features of the implementations discussed here, the popularity of the technology used to make ones, media communication, how the data stored and retrieved back (whether it is automatic or manual).
- The input that dealt in this chapter are more into which kind of data those are relevant to social experiment. Any input that comes naturally from human will be considered but a basic user experience input like a physical button will not be considered as a details that would affect social experiment, hence such details will not be included. What I meant by "naturally comes from human" is that the input will not be there because the human intentionally make the interaction. If human aware of their action, this should not be considered as an input, since the one of the design goal for this project is to create an ubiquitous wearable social sensor.
- The promoted features will mainly about the main usage of the implementation. Although usually the output, any supporting features or gimmicks that support data gathering process for both the badge wearer and the social scientists should be considered. For example client - server connection or simple LCD screen to display informations.
- The popularity of the technology used will only be considered if the implementation can be traced back within the last ten years from when this paper is written. The goal of this project is to create an alternative to the Sociometric Badge. However, the main user group, which is the social scientists, usually will not the one who create the badge but someone else with basic expertise. Hence, the more popular components used to create the implementation the better it would be for the social scientists to find this someone who will build the badge. For this purpose, I will look the popularity based on Google Trends as well as the number of results produced from specific queries related to the components/methods/tools Google search engine. Hence, for this aspect of state of the art, I need to determine what kind of components, methods, and tools are important to create the implementation. And then, I would try identify relevant search keywords to be used within Google Trends and Google search engine to determine the popularity of components, methods, and tools those are used to make the implementation.
- Media communication is how the implementation communicate, to whom it connects into, whether it is one - way or two - way communications, and whether this happens automatically or manually. Analysis on this matter will help to determine to where data is passed into as well as to determine simple communication diagram.
- The last part is how the data is stored and how can it be retrieved by the social scientists or general user. In general this parameter will be about the output of each implementations. Anything that shows information in the physical world, for example like web user interface, LEDs blinking, that is related to the input received from the implementation will be considered. This part will also look into how the data is stored, which database is used, or whether or not the implementation used one in the first place.
- From the makers perspective, this paper will look into how easy it is to make the implementation if only documentations are available for free. The documentations that this paper are looking for are the part lists, the schematics, the source codes. And for the development in this chapter the main building blocks will be defined. These building blocks are, in bigger picture, the main controller and the programming language used to program the controller.
- By the end of this chapter, there will be implementations those are not directly related to Sociometric Badge, but it has features those are nice to have in the Sociometric Badge. These specific state of the arts will have their own specifications but the date of which each implementations known to public will be noted. This will be achieved by searching the earliest possible article within the Internet.
- For this project, there are two main users, the social scientists and the makers. The main end user will be the social scientists those conduct social observation. However, since this paper is intended to be a starting point to create an alternative version of Sociometric Badge as well as due to my own personal experience as a maker, this project will have tendency to look state of the art implementation from technical point of view. As whole, these implementations will look into their simplicity and usability.