For our Semaphore System we decided to develop a system based on colors that corresponded to letters. At first it was just an idea we came up with and kept as a placeholder in case we thought of a different system, but we decided to stick with it in the end.

Our first job was to lay out all the characters we were going to use; we referred to Google to give us the most used letters of the English alphabet, so we would assign primary colors to them that would make them faster to distinguish. As we laid out our letters we began to realize that there aren’t enough bright/visible colors to actually cover 37* characters.Our next step was to cut down the amount of colors we could use, we did some math and figured out we could cut our colors down to 10 instead of the original 37*; that was one step towards efficiency.

We relied on color combinations and gestures to manage all the characters. For example, If the color Red was pointing upwards then the sender was indicating the letter ‘A’, if the sender held the stick horizontally showing the colors Red and Blue then that would indicate the letter ‘L’ and finally if the sender were to shake the stick slightly that would indicate the number associated with the two colors, ‘5’.

We matched the color combinations with the sticks, meaning that every stick covered 4 character’s total, two letters on each side plus the one combination letter and finally the number.We initially were going to have 10 sticks but cut it down again to 5 by sticking our colored pages on each side instead of one making us have less sticks to rummage through.

To cut our performance time down we also had sticky notes next to each stick that indicated what both sides had so the sender would not have to scramble to find a letter.As for the receiver they just had to indicate a thumbs up once they’ve decoded the letter, so the sender can move on to the next one.

Some of the problems we faced were the following:

-The printer was completely unreliable with color accuracy, so a couple colors turned out to look slightly similar that you couldn’t discern them immediately.

– We made the mistake of practicing the night before and realizing that the Art’s Center shut off all the lights upstairs, so we could not tell any colors apart. Meaning that our system would be unreliable during night time.

– One more possible problem would be the possibility of either participants being color blind and simply rendering the system useless (Unless it was redesigned to accommodate that.)