Conversations in Bloom

CPSC 599.88 - Physical and Tangible HCI, Project 3

Create an interactive physical visualization - an object whose physical behaviour or dynamic state represents data. The data physicalization should represent personal data.

The Idea

By using a dataset of phone call logs, we wanted to track the frequency of calls with people who are important to us. Our grandparents, parents, and friends are all groups of people who we care deeply about, but we sometimes forget to call. To remind ourselves to reach out to these people more frequently, we decided to represent the 'health' of our relationship with each group.

To physicalize this data, we settled on using a tree with dynamically changing branches to represent the health of our relationship with these groups of people.

Tree Design:

Our initial idea was to have two branches that would represent the health of our relationship with our parents and grandparents.

Initially we wanted to avoid using too many servos, so this design excluded a representation for the relationship with our friends.

Branch Design:

We played around with creating branches that could fold in on themselves. In this sketch we drew out some different designs for the components of the arm.

Initial Branch Prototypes

The largest challenge that we faced was building the branch mechanism. Our initial idea was to keep all servos underneath the tree and to use a piece of string tied to the end of the branch to pull it up. Through prototyping, we discovered that this was not easily achievable.