INFO

This week, We had a course called Mobile Hacking with Matt Cottam and Brian Hinch from Tellart.

The design brief for these five days of concept development and prototyping was to consider non-verbal communication and telepresence as constraints, while creating systems in which people could use their augmented mobile devices to interact with their pets when they were away from home.

CONCEPT

Erik, Maria and I worked as a team designed an application in which a light sensor allowed you to see if your cat’s food is running out on your iPad. Then by shaking the iPad you could shake a box of food back at home to call your cat, and by tilting the screen with the same gesture as pouring cat food from a box, you could refill the bowl. Meanwhile, a proximity sensor allowed you to see if your cat is closing or not.

DOCUMENTATION

Despite the model clearly being a sketch made of wood and hardware store parts, it was wireless and it worked.

Here is a video documentation about the process of this project.

BACKGROUND

This was a two weeks product design exercise, for a sound design course. 
We were asked to identify a product sound interface and characteristics are lacking or are of a poor design quality.

The objective was to analyze the existing sounds the product produced and envision how they could be improved. These could include new sounds and or lighting effects.

We began with a Mini Brainstorm to choose a theme which we were interested with.
We decided to design something for blood center, cause there is no any satisfy  sounds in the blood donation room  which makes people feeling nervous. We visited one blood center in Umeå to record some equipment sounds.

RESEARCH

There are more than 410 000 active blood donors in Sweden, today.
Erik is one of blood donors in our school.
We went to the blood center in Umeå follow him, and recored the sound during the process.

Based on analysis of Erik’s experience, we list all the design opportunities and try to find the potential among them.

Our main goal is to create an experience for the donors to feel about giving blood to other creatures for saving life. At the same time, the product makes donors  feel comfortable and calm. After sketches, we decided to add sound and light to pillow which can interact with donors.

PROTOTYPING

We spend couple days to make a prototype. Many tools were used in constructing the prototype. We attached touch sensors in the pillow to receive signal input and send to arduino. We also used VMusic2 audio player is an affordable and simple solution to playback audio in a controlled way. We just uploaded the sound we designed in Audacity on an USB flash disk and then issue commands to the player via serial communication. In the same time the same signal will control the LEDs inside, the light switch relates to the sound.

In this case, the challenge was that we want to this pillow can breath as a pet. We had to try various different mechanical construction to make the moving smoothly to the sound. Finally, we used a small powerful servo to make our idea coming true.

RESULT

Here is a video showing how it works and how the sound is.

BACKGROUND & RESEARCH

In this second phase of Industrial Sound Design, we were encouraged to freely experiment with relating sounds to actions. It was a team work with John and Erik, I mainly worked on prototyping.

As a starting point we were asked to select an automobile brand and discuss what is characteristic of this brand. We would imagine that the company we had chosen has decided to produce an electric car, which basically has a silent motor. That’s the reason why we need create a sound that the car can emit so that pedestrians and bicyclists can hear it approaching.

Volkswagen old Beetle was our choice. We all agreed that Volkswagen vehicle was popular using for everyday life and Beetle was a fashion classical icon. Here is the theme board for our imagine electric beetle.

PROTOTYPING

Then we began to search, record and edit sound by ourselves. For presentation, we made a prototyping which I am responsible for to show the sound relating to the actions.

I used a touch sensor, a distance sensor and a magnetic sensor which was used to count the rolling speed of the wheel to input the signal to arduino. In order to to replace the physical wired Serial communication (USB cable) with a wireless one, i used Xbee which provides wireless end-point connectivity to devices.

And I made a video dairy recorded the process of  this exercise from the begnning.

RESULT

Here is a demonstration to show how it present the sound which we designed for the vehicle.