seated
The Smart Environment and Technology Design project
The master project seated shows examples of attractively designed smart things for the home.
The seated project shows how IT in our homes will change people's ways of communicating and the way they interact with each other and also with all the smart things in the home environment.
Seated deals with the design of IT related products based on a user-oriented perspective, to help people in their daily lives. Our goal is to create design solutions that are integrated into living spaces yet express a digital form-giving language. Today it is possible to design IT products and environments that show no visible trace of their technical function.
As industrial designers, we feel it is increasingly important to develop and give form to these invisible functions. Our masters project has resulted in the design of six different product ideas based on the key words: usefulness, integrity, adaptivity, and emotionality. The ideas are gathered from interviews with people from different generations who have described moments of irritation and frustrating situations in their homes. Some of the products solve daily life problems - for instance remembering if you have locked your door or not or if you have watered the flowers. The other ideas give another dimension of emotional communication between people and with the smart home. A communication not without friction…
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Jeeves is an electronic butler guarding your door, checking your e-mail and receiving and giving messages to those entering or leaving the apartment. People forget to lock doors and windows, they drop their keys and get locked out and always carry huge heavy bunches of key about. Just to be able to keep trespassers away and protect property.
Jeeves lets you in with a simple touch of the fingertip on the fingerprint reader. On the outside, there is also a smart card reader. If you hire services - like cleaning - different people may show up each time. A smartcard can provide limited access and can be used by different people. Jeeves also has a regular doorbell. Jeeves lets you receive and leave messages to other people approaching your door - like a door answering machine. You can also redirect the doorbell or the fingerprint reader to your mobile phone or workstation. Then it allows you to answer remotely and let people into your apartment. On the inside there is a "check ok" button. It gives a quick check round - have you have locked your doors and windows, shut off the stove, the iron e.t.c?
Flower Power: Many people tend to forget to water their plants, water too much or at wrong time. The solution is durable plants, cactus, plastic plants or… FlowerPower. FlowerPower checks how our plants are nursed and reminds us when it is time to give them water. Equipped with solar cells, this smart device powers itself very much like the plants that host it. With the built-in blue light scale, the water level is shown in a subtle fashion. The system obtains the necessary nursing information from a bar code on the pot. The form has been influenced by nature, but a significant technical character gives the product a look of its own - without violating the beauty and grace of a hosting flower.
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AyTee is the foundation of your emotional relationship with your smart home. You can communicate directly to AyTee with voice and gestures or through the Friends that are placed at different locations in the apartment. AyTee communicates back to you with voice, sound, light and color. AyTee knows about other smart things through a small information or preference file that contains instructions and guidelines for all the products in the network. The AyTee concept deals with the visualization of all the things invisible and difficult to describe within a personified intelligent representation of a smart home. Someone to trust, helping you with the technology that provides the opportunity to give basic products more advanced interfaces. AyTee is not indispensable, more a complement to other technical artefacts. Of course, there is some friction. If everything works perfectly, it tends to get boring, even with AyTee…
Friends provide you with audiovisual communication with AyTee, other smart things or people. Friends pass on the information with voice and gesture control and indicate with light if it picks up sound and/or images. It is also possible to shut down the camera manually. Inside the Friend all the sensors needed for fire detection, controlling the house climate etc. are assembled. Friends make a friendly and confidence-inspiring impression - a mix of dignity and playfulness.
SmartKey Have you ever forgotten if you did or did not lock the door when you left home? Maybe you even went back to check again - just to find the door locked, having traveled unnecessarily. SmartKey is a small key that remembers if the door is locked or not. If you hesitate, just pull out your key and give it a slight squeeze. If the door is locked, it gives a firm red light, if open a twinkling red light. It could not be easier.
Virtual Connected Hands At the same time as families and generations move apart and live far away from each other, the need for communication between people increases. We are used to talking to each other over the phone. Several have tried video conferencing or communicating with pictures over the Internet. But all new media lack the more subtle parts of communication between people. With Virtual Connected Hands we are trying to recreate some of the information that becomes lost in communication using ordinary media. Virtual Connected Hands gives you the possibility of feeling the moving hand of another person. This haptic information is usually lost though it provides a dimension of communication between two people that sound and pictures cannot recreate.
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2003 Smart Studio