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.