Pressure Project 2
Posted: November 13, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Chomper by the Numbers
For PP2 we were tasked of observing instances of people interacting with something that could be considered, even remotely, technological. I chose the east entrance to Oxley’s Cafe near Dreese Labs on campus.
This particular entrance has a set of doors, one of which is slightly smarter than the other, it opens on it’s own when pushed or pulled.
The door is also placed in an extremely high traffic area. During peek hours, around lunch, there is a constant flow of people passing through or past this set of doors.
Taking inspiration from a classmate I paid close attention to exactly how people interact with the doors. This was an worthwhile effort and I learned a lot. It is easy enough to say “people open doors.” However, there is room for more detail! Which hand do they use, to the come to a stop or do they remain in motion, do they step backwards, etc… It turns out that by closely observing how people interacted with the doors several patterns emerged.
The same idea can be applied to people leaving the cafe.
But we must remember, this door has some smarts! The mechanism that opens, and holds open, the door adds significant resistance to the action of opening. It was clearly observed that this extra weight caused people passing through the door to experience something unexpected.
The most interesting observation was related tot he doors behavior of holding itself opening. There is no indication of when the timer runs out, leading some people to pass through without needing to touch the door, while the unfortunate few get chomped.
The Pressure Project also asked us to think of ways the interaction could be improved, or made worse.
The project was an excellent experience for taking a deep dive into an everyday occurrence, and finding new information there. I don’t spend much thought on observing how I move my own body, or how others move theirs. The simple act of paying attention to what it takes to open a door was eye opening. In particular, the seamless way the human wrist, arm, and shoulder work together to achieve the act of opening a door is highly complex. The key takeaway from PP3 is that when designing an immersive experience, in particular an interactive one, careful attention must be paid to every aspect of how a user interacts with a system.