Week 1 & 2 Brainstorming potential ideas

Week 2

After concluding that my initial Week#1 ideas were too ambitious (given the resource constraints of FabAcademy), I brainstormed some more realistic ideas.

1. Gesturing flower for a community garden

The Context:
In many of the shared houses I’ve lived in, community gardens tended to be located in slightly remote locations. While many residents are initially interested, many would stop engaging with it after a while due to the distance. Also, watering was often an issue; there needs to be a simple system for keeping track of who watered when.

The Proposition:
I would like to create an eye-catching flower object that remind residents of plants’ status. The plant’s demeaner can subtly remind them when plants require watering. Also, residents can see which person recently watered, which can become a conversation starter among interested residents.

3. Convenient Spice Cabinet

I have many spices/herbs, condiments, oils but it’s a nightmare trying to locate the right ones every time I cook
I would like to find a system to keep them organized, and a system that indicates where the spices I need are.

The spices will be activated by voice control:

However, the more I considered its requirements, the more it felt like too big of a challenge to realise.
Requirements:

4. Coat-hanger & bag holder extention

When I quit my last job, I spent the 1 month in between jobs to learn Woodworking in Hida Takayama. During this time, I designed and made a chair that was also a coat-hanger.
While I had good reasons for creating this hybrid design, I always felt like the coat-hanger component and chair component should exist separately.
In FabAcademy, I would like to develop the coat-hanger component, which will include an Intuitive display of weather information along the rail (using colored light), and a bag-holding station which also features a way to check that I have all my things inside the bag.

Week 1

Before starting FabAcademy, I came up with 2 broad themes I was interested in exploring.
1. How can I stay better connected with my close family and friends who live far away, in an analog but intuitive and playful way?
2. As someone with mild ADHD, how can I create a personalized tool to stay on top of my day?

1. Analog way for keeping in touch with a long-distance friend

2. Personalized keychain to stay on top of my day

I would like to stop wasting my time before going out looking for important items such as keys, phones, diary, etc. Also, there are countless days when I forget to check the weather app and have to return for the umbrella.
Ideally, this keychain not only tracks my valuables, but replaces as many critical features of my iphone as possible onto a physical tool, helping me stay more focused on my immediate surroundings.

After hearing my instructors’ and classmates’ feedback, I decided to explore the feasibility of the 1st idea further.

However, after considering all the options, I became less and less convinced that I can achieve this vision during the 6 months of FabAcademy.

Here were some of the potential directions I considered;

1. Nagano san’s advice

She gave me a number of potential ideas for realizing the moving magnet. I agreed with the 4th direction, but I eventually realised the challenge of achieving this… (#3 below)

2. Rico’s advice- Using Flip dot magnets

Rico shared an artist who uses flip dot magnets to create interactive artworks. But unfortunately I had only recently seen my sister’s strong aversion to a flip-dot magnet artwork!

3. Rico’s advice - using robotically controlled magnets

Rico shared an alumni’s final project, Johnny Tim’s magnet skater.

I also found this past work by Shaun Salzberg, who made 2 digital chessboards that could play remotely. He placed 128 hall effect sensors, 1 on each grid, to capture moves.

But even at this low granularity of a chess board, he talks of limitations of speed and cost to realize his idea. He initially considered placing RFID sensors on each piece, but he eventually gave up on it due to cost. Imagine the difficulty of achieving my idea with multiple magnets!