Arduino Ideation // Maddy Harrison & Ben Schiffler

We started out looking at a handful of various places where sensors might end up being useful, or might provide unique information to design areas.

Arduino Furniture Ideation // Nick Ricci & Naoki Hisamoto

INSTALAMP

The lamp detects when food is served at a table and captures a well-lit picture of it for those looking to post food pictures on their social media.

The lamp provides tables at food establishments a lit environment appropriate for the type of restaurant it is. When food is presented at the table, the lamp senses it and increases the brightness so that a well-lit picture can be captured.

The lamp then sends the picture to the cloud or social media for the customer to access and post to their social media.

The lamp requires what is required for the dining experience and hangs above the table.

REFILL WATER SENSOR

The table detects whether a customer needs a water refill or not so that the customer does not need to flag a waiter or waitress for more water.

The table detects the weight of water or drink a cup has. When the cup is placed on the sensor (which looks like a coaster or area meant for a cup), the weight is taken. When the liquid weight drops below a quarter of the total weight, the waiter/waitress is informed and they come by with a refill.

A regular restaurant environment is required and possibly a modification to a table or a completely new product piece.

FORECAST LAMP

The light detects the weather forecast and depicts it in the form of lights.

The cube shaped lamp receives information on the weather forecast and takes colors associated with each forecast. Then the lamp triggers different LEDs to emit different colors of lights that were taken from the forecast. For example, a dim white/gray light would emit for overcast or a sunny hot day would emit a bright orange light.

The lamp would only require a stand or could potentially be hanging.

Initial Ideas | Hsuan-Ting + Melinda

Smart furniture concepts | Summer & Kyle

In the University of Washington interaction design program, we are exploring the use of objects that are able to sense and react to events in the environment. These are our first three concepts for the project.

Furniture Concepts - Gloria & Jessica

Tess & Jordan Problem Spaces

Furniture Ideas // Camila De Vincenzo and Stephen Coyner (Post #1)

Smart Furniture Concepts | Emily & Angelica

1) A table that starts playing music and disco lights after working for a certain time. 

2) Chair that alerts you through sounds or vibrations that you are slouching in your chair.

3) A table that allows people to play games and start conversations. 

Smart Furniture Concepts | Christine & Olivia

Baby Monitor - Summer Shang & Jaewon Hwang

We decided to knoll a baby monitor for this assignment.

There are two main parts for the baby monitor, one is used by parents and one is used by babies. The mom's side has a radio input for parents to listen to babies, while baby's side is a sound input to sense baby's sound by microphone and use transducer to send sounds to moms. 

In baby's side, the transducer, electrical signal and amplified are powered into circuit board from adaptor, while parent's side have filtered, electrical signal and amplified to power into circuit board from battery. Hence, parents can move around with the baby monitor and listen to babies anytime they want. 

The interesting thing we discovered in the baby monitor is that baby's side has LED lights to indicate the frequency of baby's side. Also, the crystals inside of baby's side can switch between two different frequencies, so it can differentiate baby's sound frequency from other electronic devices at home.

Pin Pad // Nick Ricci & Naoki Hisamoto

Nick Ricci and I decided to knoll a pin pad used to create debit and credit card transactions.

From the outside we could have guessed how the pin pad worked. With a plastic shell on the outside containing all of the circuitry on the inside, our mental model was: a card is swiped or inserted, the information is taken, the CPU processes the information, sends the information to a bank via USB, SIM card, or ethernet, the CPU displays whether the transaction is successful or not on the display.

Held together by nine screws, pulled apart the pin pad reader and found two very significant things that we learned about ways products are put together.

1. The way the key pad works is strange at a first glance because rubber is not a conductor and it does not create a physical click on the circuit board lying beneath the rubber piece. To the naked eye, the rubber does not contain any metal pieces to create the connection. However, by rubbing the rubber key pad on a piece of paper, it leaves pencil like streaks signifying that the rubber itself contains a graphite like material that can act as a conductor.

2. The second piece we did not understand was a free floating metal cylinder that looked like a button with a rubber ring around one end. When pressed, a metal piece extends past the rubber ring at the end of the cylinder. The "button" cannot be accessed from the outside and lays between the circuit board and a orange board. We also noticed that the battery is soldered to the board. We came to conclusion that because the pin pad carries very precious information, it can be very bad if it is tampered with. So this piece actually acts as a conductor between the orange and green boards but if someone tries to tamper with the pin pad by opening it, the metal recedes back behind the rubber and is no longer conductive. Therefore, it almost acts as a kill switch when people try to open up a pin pad to protect people's credit and debit card information.

Knolling was definitely a fun activity getting to physically see how everyday objects work!

Label Maker - Angelica Cupat and Emily Phan

For this project, Emily and I decided to knoll a label maker. Before we disassembled our thrift store find, we made sure to waste an hour on our sofa making dozens of fun labels. We became very attached to our $2 labeler and hesitated to place the screwdriver into the first screw.

Label makers are pretty complex. One of the coolest things we discovered was that our little labler had a motor that was responsible for unrolling the label strip. When the keyboard sensor registered that the "print" button was pressed, the motor would activate, causing fans and rubber coils to spin and roll out a printed label. The black letters that are printed on the label were created through applying a heated plastic strip with tiny sensors onto the temperature-sensitive labels. 

Though Emily and I completely ripped apart our poor labler, we learned a lot! We are set on purchasing a new label maker from a thrift store in the near future.

Knolling – Fat Loss Monitor – Rishi Agarwal and Annie Pyle

No Phones At The Table – Pseudocode and Pseudotable – Rishi Agarwal and Annie Pyle

Apparently fat loss monitors are pretty simple. The grips are literally just thin pieces of metal used to conduct electricity through the user's hands. The plates touch wires which lead to a sensor that processes the electrical signals and relays the information to the main processing unit. This unit seems to be connected to basically everything else on the board including the batteries, the buttons and the screen.

The most intriguing part of the teardown was the screen. At first, it seemed that the screen was not electrically connected to the board. Upon closer inspection we realized that the screen was connected to the board by a thin, transparent film on the screen's edge and narrow conductive columns within the foam that supported the screen itself. 

Karaoke Machine // Maddy Harrison & Ben Schiffler

This karaoke machine with disco lights was a very interesting pick for this project as it not only looked wicked as heck, but also looked like it was built of a ton of crazy component parts. We soon realized after taking it apart that while it was actually quite decent looking on the outside, on the inside it was a hot-glue-mess of pieces thrown together with little semblance of organization.

         

It was divided in half with an apartment-like structure of wood all hot glued together. We assumed from the outside that there would probably be some central nervous CPU that took in the various tactile, microphone, power, and cd inputs, and converted these to the outputs of the speaker, lights, and auxiliary output. In actuality this was spread across several circuit boards, a mess of wires, all which were slotted around this two-level housing structure.

We did note a few things we hadn't thought of - there's a kill switch directly wired from the cd lid, which you need to open to access the CD spinner, to the CPU - we assumed this is what allowed the cd to stop spinning when the lid is open. There were a few other weird moments, such as when we noticed the speaker was wired through the AUX output board as opposed to the CPU, and how the CD Reader kill switch went first to the CPU as opposed to the CD Reader. Some of these were probably due to physical constraints, but given the amount of hot glue and ramshackle interior construction that happened, it's equally possible that there just wasn't much thought put into it.

In the end, it was fascinating to see how cleanly such a messy system can be abstracted. Perhaps even more interesting however was, in looking at from the outside, it looked and acted like a system with a very simple mental model: you put in a CD and your microphone, and get out a TV display, blinking lights, and audio. However, when you look at the inside, the mess of construction compounded with the actual need for more technical wiring makes the system into a much more complicated (and perhaps, needlessly so) system.

Alarm Clock // Tess Manthou & Jordan Kiga

      The portable clock/alarm clock sparked our interest because it’s a very typical object in our society that resides in just about every home. Even with the growing use of smart phones for clocks and alarms, physical clocks still surround us day to day and we had never given much thought to how they actually operated. Before we took apart the clock we guessed about a very simple system inside the clock. It turned out that we were basically right as only a small number of parts make up the machine. The battery starts the operation by enabling the on/off switch, which drives the motor to control the clock hands. The clock hands are also operated by the alarm setting and the manual hand controls. Although the interior was simple, It’s enlightening to discover how exactly this basic object functions. Next time though, we may pick something a little more complex.

Game Controller / Christine & Olivia

We decided to choose a game controller as our object because it was not only nostalgic, but mechanically interesting as well. It also helped having the colorful buttons to catch our attention as well. As we took apart the controller we discovered that the basic functionality of it was not that complicated at all. In lame terms, there is a power source a main control panel that determines what the user is trying to accomplish and relays that to the main game box.

Even though the simplicity of the basic terms, we realized that the technical aspect such as the infrared device is very complicated. This is why we chose the game controller.

Flashlight - Jessica & Gloria

We discovered that the flashlight uses a simple LED light and circuit that is powered by three watch batteries. The movement of the flashlight comes from the energy of pushing the button - which releases the spring and turns the viscous hinges. Once the viscous hinges turn, the circuit is completed so the light turns on.

We chose this object because of its interesting mechanical aspect. Although the technical aspect of the flashlight is not complicated, it still performs a complicated enough movement that appeals to us.

*TYPO: Viscus --> Viscous