Critical Practices DES INV 190

Chris.0 was project completed in the Fall of 2016 for Design Innovation 190, challenging our team of 5 (Kylon, Yuni, Alex, & Advaita) to intimately design a hyperpersonal "something" for someone within our community. For our project, we selected Christopher Hunn, the Computer Science Advisor. I primarily worked on ideation & graphics for the project.

The Challenge

To Create a hyperpersonal object for a person of our choosing utilizing 3-D printing, lasercutting, and human-centered research of and individual.

The Process

We interviewed a number of individuals within our community, aiming at strangers that we stumble upon commonly or close acquaintances that would be worth-while designing a product for. We eventually stumbled upon the gracious and kind Christopher Hunn. A well liked Computer Science Advisor. He has a diverse range of interests, often traveling and finding excitement in adventure and story telling. Find a balance between his intellectual side that is stimulated by arts and recreation, through music, poetry, and connecting with the students that he advises.

We sought to find the gaps in his routine that could use improvement or moments that would better be spent less stressed, yet we were surprised to find that Chris thoroughly enjoys the stressful rigor of his routine and does not really find much missing in his life. However as we dug deeper, we found that he felt a loss of connection with his students due to the large influx in students at UC Berkeley that required advising for the Computer Science department. Likewise, he does not have as much time to attend story-telling events that he usually frequents. 

So we thought to create a tongue-in-cheek play on his love for story-telling, connection, and self-reflection in the shower by design a doll that would record and play back his own voice. This item could be placed in his office and great students as they come in for advising or he could simply place at home and find a sense of amusement from this whimsical way of self-reflection.

The Design Process

Initially we had planned on creating a voice recorder that could be held within the doll and simply pressed, much like many childhood dolls can be interacted with. Yet, we found that the hardware of arduinos would require external parts to be ordered with delay, so for the purposes of this project, we designed a doll that would sit a top a box that would house an arduino bread board that would connect to a laptop computer. We could then run a python script that when pressed on record would record the sound through the laptop & return through the laptop speakers.

The Product

In the end, we were satisfied with the product we had created. Due to the limited time period for which it was due for our project, we felt that this met the qualifications for what we had hoped to achieve. Chris Hunn enjoyed our product & even came out to our showcase at the end of the semester! 

Take-aways for the future / Improvements to be made next interation:

• Internally mount arduino

• House speaker/play internally within doll

• Develop a casing for the speaker and play buttons to be contained within doll

• House rechargeable battery for speaker with protection from cotton