Last couples of weeks I have worked on developing research ideas and planning out overall study procedures. This has been more specified after meeting with Prof. Ponto on Monday.

Given the time constrains, we decided to keep the overall procedure relatively simple for the STAR project.

This progress report 4 is organized as follows. First, I will discuss the series of behavioral data that can be measured and analyzed for the STAR project. Although original research plan was simply to compare shopper’s in-store behaviors in both 3D virtual store and actual store, I would like to develop the study further. On Monday meeting, we discussed other potential aspects to be examined in order to get the bigger picture of store design research. This would be what I will largely cover for the last half of this progress report.

The popularly accepted industry adage is that “unseen is unsold”. Consistent with this belief, retailers have developed the strategies to drag shoppers’ attention and expose them to more products. Suppose a shopper enters the university store to buy notebooks. When passing by electronics aisle, she remembers that her computer mouse got broken last week and need a new one. In-store stimuli such as products or promotion banners can guide shopper’s overall shopping paths as it triggers further wants and needs. Along these lines, for the STAR project, I would like to collect series of behavioral data that show how shoppers use physical products in the store as external memory cues that create new needs or trigger forgotten needs.

Specific plans for data collections are as follows.

In both conditions, participants will be asked to check the 3 product categories they planned to purchase during the current shopping trip. The main purpose of limiting the number of products in both conditions is to facilitate easier comparison in regard to the shopping paths deviation. However, this approach can invite some criticism. It would be necessary to think about valid reasons that can back up such manipulation.

Through meeting on Monday, we concluded that calculating reference/actual shopping paths can be rather complicated. In such case, we will compare the number of items that shoppers pay attention to, approach to and examine.

In order to develop this research further, I would like to examine other variables that can have impacts on in-store behaviors.

1) Store familiarity in terms of product location and layout

2) Shopping goal

The situation variable, shopping goal, affects in-store decision making in various ways. Along with the mind set and construal level theory, it is generally known that individuals who are in abstract state are more susceptible to environmental cues as undecided individuals do not know yet what they want to buy. Research consistently reports that shopper use physical products in the store as external memory cues that create new needs or trigger forgotten needs (Hui, Inman, Huang, and Suher, 2013; Inman and Winer, 1998; Park, Iyer and Smith, 1989). My central premise is that shoppers who are less certain of their goal would shop more, because they are more open to in-store stimuli and guided by external memory that triggers wants or needs. When consumer shops with concrete goal in their mind, product search should be guided by internal memory. In contrast, when consumers are not fully aware of what they want, search activities should be guided by external memory. This in turn will increase susceptibility to attractive marketing promotion for shopper.

With respect to shopping goal, I suppose following hypothesis can be tested in both actual and 3D virtual store.

Hypothesis 1: Compare to consumers who have concrete shopping goals, those who have abstract shopping goals browse and search product in a less selective manner.

Hypothesis 1a: Compare to who have concrete shopping goals, those who have abstract shopping goals pay attention to more diverse categories of products.

Hypothesis 1b: The probability that visual attention (noting) leads to following searching behavior (approaching and examination) is higher for consumers who have abstract overall shopping goal compare to consumers who have concrete shopping goals.

*) We also discussed the possibility of studying online shopping behavior. Surprisingly, there is no research that explicitly compare the searching behavior in offline and online shopping contexts to my knowledge. I will discuss it more about this on next post.

*) I got IRB reviews & comments. As it says that I need letter of permission to conduct the study at the bookstore, I got a signature from Duane and secured the permission today. I will be working on revising IRB for next couples of weeks.

My Independent Study with Professor Kevin Ponto in this semester has come to a final stage. I would like to conclude my study with the following discussions:

My proposed study theme was “Manipulation of contemporary medical imageries”. The method of investigation was art practice. This kind of art practice project was not only a personal expression, but also rooted on studying how our human condition was viewed through a multi-disciplinary lens in art, design and medical science. My art practice comprises 2 parts:

1. Create a physical artwork which addresses medical image mapping.

2. Extend the theme with a video projection with basic mapping techniques to display MRI images.

In early November 2015, I completed all 2 parts. These two artworks became part of my MA Show in Mid-November, along with a performance piece performed by my music collaborator, Brain Grimm and myself.

Overall, this project is extremely fruitful. Though there were many obstacles during the process, I am very pleased of the experience and the outcome.

Hereby, I would like to discuss mainly on the architectural glass window installation. This is because the installation work represented best of my project goals. This installation piece took me the longest time and greatest effort. Yet. It is also the most rewarding one. I spent 2 months to conduct extensive research on:

• Gothic stained glass (color scheme, method of narrative, pattern design, etc.)
• Architectural environment of the Humanities Building, UW-Madison (Brutalism in architectural design, geometrical features of the 13 glass panels on north wing, dynamical change of visual characteristics depends on light setting from day to night and from interior to exterior, inhabitant behaviors, etc.)
• Design of the window installation with medical images to tell my personal story (my own MRIs, chemical structure of human cell and drugs, medical symbols, etc.)
• Use of materials  (Choice of see-through vinyl sheets, degree of transparency, degree of color intensity when light pass through, durability, UV protected, material cost, shipping cost, shipping timeframe, contingency plan, etc.)

I enjoyed the research process a lot. My knowledge on medical images and media design was enriched in a large extent. In addition, the installation occupies the 6^th and 7^th floor and was 18.5 feet high and 15.5 feet wide, with 13 window panels in different shapes and dimensions. It was absolutely challenging both in artistic sense and physical installation process. The outcome was very satisfied. The artwork was well-received by different parties. Besides learning and art-making satisfaction in this project, I also received practical rewards. This installation will continue to stay in the Humanities building. Moreover, I was awarded the 2016 David and Edith Sinaiko Frank Graduate Fellowships for Woman in the Arts in Mid-December. This award will allow me to continue my art project in the same theme.

In this sense, this particular installation has met 90% of what I originally planned for. I reached my goals with extra rewards. The 10% left was mainly about time management and budget constraint. The installation process required manpower exceeded one person. Ideally, I need at least 3 persons to work together for 1-2 days. In reality, I completed the installation one classmate in 2 full days. It is quite a miracle. In addition, the cost of materials was very high when I quoted the pricing locally. My final choice is to order the vinyl sheets from China-based printing company and had them shipped to me. In this case, I took the risk of quality control. Fortunately, the prints came out nicely. The 10% hurdles did not cause major drawbacks in the overall project.

As mentioned, I will move this project forward under the funding from the award I got. In my application of this award, I proposed that, “This project will served as a complete series of my architectural installation as well as part of my PhD (pending) preliminary requirement.” I am recently  moving forward to the area of media technology, especially application of virtual reality.

My next step is to consolidate my PhD program and really start! I plan to move into the research and practice process towards my PhD study direction.

In conclusion, I have excellent experience in this project. Professor Ponto supervised me on regular base with clear guidance. And he gave me enough trust and freedom so I was able to excel academically and artistically. I am looking forward to proceed to the next phrase under Professor Ponto’s advice.

Additional writing about contemporary artists who employed their own images as “medical body”. This writing was abstracted from my MA degree research:

“Autopathography of the Artist’s Own Medical Body”

(uploaded article from academic.edu)

Final Composition

For my final composition, I really wanted to go all out. I was thinking of a way of shaping a terrain, like a generative landscape circumscribed by beautiful curves and colors. From my experience studying electromagnetism my junior year, I knew vector fields of attraction or repulsion can create beautiful compositions. So my goal was to simulate a pseudo vector field (this really isn’t exactly realistic) with 3 attractors, randomly positioned across the canvas. Toxiclibs is a great resource for simplifying the process of coding such a scenario because the its vector classes and verletphysics engine take out most of the manual setting up of forces and correspoding motion of the particles. You simply set up your grid of particles and attractors as arrays and the kinematics are automatically calculated.

Prof. Ponto has asked me to prepare a brief review of the semester by answering some questions.

1- What are your overall feelings on your project?

– I am very satisfied with what I accomplished this semester. This was my first time coding and each week I feel that the complexity of my compositions and the flow of writing code got a lot better. At the end of the semester, I started getting a bit sidetracked by my other academic responsibilities but I am very glad that I ended up with 14 different sketches, some of which could be used for the conceptualization of architectural form.

2- How well did your project meet your original project description and goals?

From a logistics point of view, according to my syllabus I should have ended up with 16 different sketches. I was only able to complete 14 compositions and 12 blog entries, though I am finishing up two additional ones before Monday. So that was an acceptable performance, in my opinion, but not stellar. I was not able to do Chapter 5 of the “Nature of Code” which would have introduced me to boids and flocking behaviors, which is really the real core of autonomous agent systems. With that said, I was able to get a lot of practice on particle systems.

3- What were the largest hurdles you encountered? How did you overcome these challenges?

Coding is difficult. It takes me a lot of time. I feel like I can code, but probably not for a living. I feel like I am not expedient enough. But there is something that really pushes me to want to continue doing this. I really want to prove that I can be part of the next generation of generative designers. I want to be able to use these simple algorithms in the conception of a building. When I look at the images that the code generates, I always find myself extracting the form and making it architecture in my mind. That intrigue of what it could be if I were to use the curves  or point clouds as the basis of building plan, or landscaping or actual 3D forms, was motivating enough to keep pushing harder.

4- If you had more time, what would you do next?

I definitely want there to be a next time, next semester. I have set my mind on coding  boids and meshes from their trajectories and Processing, with the addition of another library, has the capability of creating isosurfaces from point data that can then be exported to a 3D modeling package for polishing and sculpting. I want to develop a workflow between my code and the software that I already use like Rhino, 3DS MAX. I want to continue the study of agent based systems as a another of form exploration.

Thank you so much.

This week covered Chapter 5 of “The Nature of Code” which introduces us to a very useful library for physics based simulations called Toxiclibs.

I am using Toxiclibs to create my final composition because it is great to produce compositions based on vector fields. However this chapter focused on Toxiclibs classes to simulate soft bodies. Toxiclibs contains it’s own set of particles package called VerletParticles, and  springs called VerletSprings. When you first begin a sketch using Toxiclibs you will have to include an import statement for a particular package to reference back to the methods and classes that you are going to use. The reference doc is very extensive and can be found here.

For the chapter, I completed the exercise that asked to develop a softbody cloth using a grid of particles connected by strings. This required once again, much like in the shatter example, the need to arrange particles in a grid separeted by a distance which would equal the rest distance of the spring. Below is a screenshot of the simulation:

Cloth Simulation

For this week’s composition, I decided to still continue with the particle systems and leave the use of toxiclibs for my final composition. I wanted to try something more geometrical and thought that I could come up with an evolving polygon by having particles connect to each other as they moved abt the screen space. In the future, an export of these lines to a CAD software can be incorporated into the application such that the 2D forms could be used as the starting basis of a floor plan. My sketch can be played here.

I haven’t gotten a chance to talk about Polymorphism and Inheritance from Chapter 4 yet so I wanted to make a post about them.

We have seen how coding particle systems becomes a lot more intuitive when done in an object – oriented way by creating classes and defining arrays of objects of those classes. In more complicated scenarios, we may want to have more than one type of particle or agent with specific functions associated with it. Even then, it is very likely that each class will still have a lot of the same properties; since they are particles, their constructors will all have location vectors, velocity vectors and acceleration vectors. Moreover, their functions for describing motion may be the same. So it would seem like a good idea if we could re use the code in some way. Inheritance allows us to do this very easily by extending the properties of another class. So a class that inherits another class becomes a subclass of that class:

class Cat extends Animal {
  Cat() {
    super();
  }
  void meow() {
    println("MEOW!");
  }
}

This means that the cat inherits all of the properties and functions of the Animal. Using super() makes sure that the same initialized properties of the Animal(height, weight) are given to the cat. Also any functions of the animal, for example, eat(), sleep() are also now applicable to the cat. In addition to those functions, the cat object can have its own functions.

So what becomes of a cat object when it is extending another class? In cases where we are declaring arrays or arraylists, code specifies the type of objects that array will store,

ArrayList<Cat> kitty = new ArrayList<Cat>();

Polymorphism makes it possible to store subclasses of a class together as if they were the same type. So it is now perfectly valid to say

ArrayList<Animal> kitty = new ArrayList<Cat>();

With particles systems, this enables us to store all types of particles into one array as long as all the subclasses extend the same Particle class.

For this week’s project, I wanted to make sure that I was able to do particle system branched out into a particle class and a particlesystem subclass. This is a good way to start getting into the habit of coding a particle type and then a particle controller. First I did two exercises out of the chapter.

The first exercise asked for a movable rocket. This was basically an extension of Week 10 sketch of having a particle system moving while releasing particles.

Asteroid Exercise

The second exercise wanted a geometrical form to divide into smaller pieces or shatter. This amounted to using our regular Particle class and then having our ParticleSystem class arrange them in a grid. I wasn’t able to center it in the middle so I think my arrangement was off. When you clicked on the canvas, the particles began their kinematic method and started moving as if shattering.

Shatter Exercise

For this week’s script, I decided to do another particle system but this time incorporating oscillation kinematics, as covered in Chapter 3, to give the particles a more life-like appearance. The particle system was done following the style of using two classes, one for the particle and one for the particlesystem. You may see the script here. Originally I had planned to incorporate the collisions in this script but I ran out of time.

I worked on IRB and developed questionnaire.

Following Alex and Prof. Ponto’s advice I tried to describe overall procedures rather broadly than providing detailed description, however since all documents(i.e. survey questions, consent forms, and recruitment materials) should be coherent(those things get stamped at the end) it was quite challenging to make overall IRB proposals and all these documents sensible and go well with each other. As any changes on those documents mean a change request, I tried to asked for everything I might want to do which took me a quite time. IRB has been submitted on last Monday.

As I stated in IRB proposal, throughout the study I intend to

1) Explore shopper’s in-store shopping paths and purchase behaviors both in an actual store and different types of 3D virtual stores

2) Compare and analyze the static measures

3)  Assess the validity of measuring in-store behaviors in computer simulated virtual retail environments.

I did not fully describe plans for data analysis however I intend to produce two different studies through this project. The overall structure of the project would be as following.

During stage one, I will investigate the validity of measuring in-store behavior in 3D VR environment by comparing static measures that include 1) walking path 2) deviation from optimal walking path 3) number of item examined 4) category of items examined 5) time spent in the store environment to same data set obtained from actual store.

This is an original & primary plan for STAR project. The biggest challenge is how to assess the validity of outcome measures. With the small number of participants (about 20 participants in each condition) absolute value comparison can not be quite meaningful. As what I am interested in is shopping pattern (e.g. do participants examine VR store in a similar manner as they do in actual store) descriptive analysis could be more meaningful.

Stage two, in which I newly developed my interest, involves exploratory look into in-store behavior. Surprisingly, to my knowledge, there are only handful of researches that examined causal relationship between in-store shopping path and purchase behavior. Even  existing pertinent study on shopping path majorly focused on relationship between in-store shopping distance and unplanned purchase behavior. “Unseen is unsold” has become an industry adage however there is no research that explicitly studied how seeing lead to buying. Using the instrumental approach, head mount action camera, I will be able to estimate the direct impact of in-store attention to subsequent searching behavior. To develop a valid research frame work, I am currently working on investigating other variables(i.e. prior exposure to the brand, consumer impulsivity) that have potential impact on such attention-searching relation.

Walking path Data) 

Reference path or optimal path: It refers to shoppers planned in-store path that minimize the distance he or she must cover to pick up all planned purchases.

Actual shopping path(=reference path+error): While in the store, the shopper may deviate from the reference path. For example, the shopper who planned to buy winter jacket may be attracted to warm winter hat displayed in the store and thus incur additional travel distance.

Deviation for the shopping path(error): this is primary interest of mine. I would like to see how it relates to unplanned purchase behavior and store layout.

Survey question

(1) familiarity with the University bookstore in terms of product location and store layout

(2) last time visited university bookstore

(3) mental map (do not know how to use this but just included it just in case)

(4) whether participants have shopping list for current shopping trip or not

(5) expected expenditure for the shopping

(6) all the product they plan to purchase