Some project ideas

on Final project

During the last week I’ve been mulling over some final project ideas. Here I’m going to write down some thoughts about them.

Privacy aware wearables and domotics

Most of wearables and domotic devices on the market today are built on the business model that corporations are getting control over your personal private data. An example project could be a fitbit-like personal tracker device, or a robotic vacuum cleaner.
The long term core idea is to build a ecosystem of privacy aware and free (as in freedom) alternatives.

Conversation compass

In poorly facilitated meetings we often face the problem of few people taking up most of the discussion space. This behaviour is often consequence of biases on gender, ethnicity and more.
“Conversation compass” is a smart speakerphone able to detect inbalances in conversations.
A first simple version could be based only on directional microphones and a series of lights to give feedback in a user friendly way.
A more advanced version could have a voice recognition capabilities to identify individuals, detect interruptions, and maybe also non respectful language.

Smart standing desk

An adjustable and smart standing desk, with abilty to store personal configurations, detect the user presence, adapt lights based on day time, etc.

Digital electric instrument

A guitar-like digital electric instruments for kids to learn the basics of playing music …and have fun :)

At the moment I haven’t settled for anyone of these ideas in particular.

As next step I will start sketching, playing with smaller prototypes, bouncing the ideas towards potential users to get feedback, and start considering “how” to build them in practice.

I consider the “conversation compass” and the “electric instrument” the ones that need more prototyping and more design interations. The two others are more concrete and have existing similar products to take as inspiration.