Posted on

Visualizing Time: A Marble a Minute

Sung Hoon Kim

How can I visualize the time we spend each day on our smartphones in a dynamic and physical way that reminds us of the time not spent doing other things and helps us reflect on the need to make changes in our choices?

Description

On average, Americans use their smartphones 17 times a day, which amounts to about 4.7 hours. If we sleep 8 hours a night, this means that almost 30% of our time awake is spent on a smartphone every day. I’m interested in finding a way to help make us more aware of these 4.7 hours.
A Marble a Minute includes two parts. First part of it is a dynamic wall hanging (24” x 24”) that represents a users’ time spent on their smartphones, showing the aggregation of time spent, minute-by-minute, during each 24-hour period. The wall hanging will be circular in shape, with a wood frame (resembling a clock) that contains 1440 marbles (one for each minute in a day). A horizontal restraining bar in the middle of the wall hanging holds the marbles in the top half of the frame. It releases one marble at a time to represent each minute spent on the smartphone. At the end of each 24-hour period, the wall hanging rotates to bring all of the marbles back to the top half of the frame. The second part of it is an iPhone app for collecting time data and transferring the data to a server that is connected to the wall hanging.

Classes

Project Development Studio (Danny Rozin)

Posted on

Cyborg Market

Fengyi Franklin Zhu

A fictional cyborg market that sell robotic creatures

http://www.fengyizhu.com/Project

Description

This is a series of two robotic creatures – “cecile” thecyborg flower and “#” the cyborg creature. Each robotic figures are highly tailored made with sophisticated details, and this overall conceptual artistic expression about buiding a market that sell robotic creatures would would make an odd but interesting touch on the connection between human and technology.

Classes

Project Development Studio (Danny Rozin)

Posted on

Saltwater Lamp

Aaron Parsekian

A lighting fixture which is powered by saltwater, bright enough to read by, and built from renewable and recycled materials.

http://www.aaronparsekian.com/?cat=10

Description

This project is the result of my journey over the past semester attempting to develop a lamp that runs on salt water and is constructed out of recycled or renewable materials. My light works by pouring salt water into three chambers which have magnesium and carbon electrodes wired in series, which in turn produces enough current and voltage to power 100 lumens of LED’s. It is bright enough to read under, and will last all night without replenishing the water. With the exception of the three rice-sized LED’s, this lamp is compostable when it reaches its end of life (currently estimated at six months). The carbon electrodes were designed by me, and use pine tree rosin to bind charcoal together to act as the battery anodes. The container of the lamp is made out of cardboard and is waterproofed using pine resin as well. My vision for this lamp is for it to be constructed out of materials that can be understood by a layman, and to not contain any of the harmful chemicals normally found in batteries and electronics. In its current iteration, my light is constructed of cardboard, pine sap, charcoal, magnesium, copper wire, and three high-efficiency LED’s. Currently I have been testing my fixture with saltwater that is the same average salinity as sea water.

Classes

Basic Analog Circuits, Project Development Studio (Danny Rozin), Transformational Design: Mindfulness and Physical Computing for Experience-driven Design