SNAPION- Rethinking Imagery
Client: Class Assignment
Project Timeline: 2 Weeks (March 2014)
Project Guide: Asst.Prof.Keyur Sorathia
Team Members: Avinandan Basu, Jatin Bajaj, Soumya Tiwari
Design Keywords: Physical Computing, Tangible-User Interactions, Product Design
Role:
Secondary and Primary Research | Conceptualization | Problem Scoping | Decision making and structuring | Product building | Presentation and Documentation | Arduino Coding
Design Brief
Pictures and associated memories are integral and important part of our lives. We see things, capture them and store them in our archives. These archives are lifetime savings of people, places and experiences those include our families, friends, colleagues, adventures and experiences. However, sometimes we miss to capture few precious moments those we regret later. These precious moments can range from first walk of your daughter to your first award as best employee. When we miss them we say, “I wish, I could capture them.”
The project on the course of Tangible User Interface aims to build new concepts on tangible interfaces those help capture “precious moments” of our lives. Students are expected to research, design and prototype new concepts of Tangible User Interfaces to satisfy user needs and enhance user experiences. Students can research upon different themes, contexts, contents and users to further narrow their choice of proposed topic.
Design Process
Secondary Research
Technology Study
After an explorative brainstorming session to fix a certain specific scenario to move forwards from the given design prompt on “Imagining Imagery”, a detailed scenario on “mom trying to click child’s picture while bathing” was chosen. All the possible trigger actions or tangibles were listed out, followed by pointing the intuitive actions that governed these tangibles. An in depth study of the kind of intuitive interactions involved by humans in general when capturing an image or a moment in particular was carried out in order to define the interactions with our tangible. A mood board can be seen in FIGURE (on the left) to understand the same.
Mood Board
A mood board was created with randomly collected pictures from different blogs, studies and web generated images to understand the different modes and ways of clicking pictures.
Scenario Building
An explorative brainstorming was done to ideate about all the possible use cases and scenarios according to the design prompt given on trying to captures “moments of life”. The main target was around trying to make “mother” the user as childhood is taken as the most precious time to snap photos and moments of a child. So we finalized on a scenario:
A mother is giving her baby boy his first bath and wants to capture the baby’s priceless expression when she splashes water on the baby’s face. She simply uses the SNAPION kept along with the other toiletries to do so. She turns on the family album button, sets the timer for about 5 seconds approximately, sees through the ring to view the area to be captured and changes the location as desired and opens and drops the trigger ring. And by the time she splashes the water on her baby’s face, the picture is captured.
Design Ideation
Interactions
SNAPION, the tangible user interface to capture images, consists of three components mainly: the body, the timer ring, and the trigger ring (as explained in design features).
The form of main body as described above is largely inspired from a variety of objects ranging from a flower vase to a shampoo bottle that fit into general contexts. This part of the SNAPION contains the inner circuitry as well which includes an Arduino board, LEDs and connecting wires. This part has four toggle buttons attached to its outer surface.
When the user wants to click an image, in a particular context all he needs to do is first turn on the button corresponding to the album he wants to store the image in, rotate the timer ring to set a particular timer, if desired, and then lift the open end of the outer ring and drop it, which ultimately triggers the code to command the camera.
Design Features
The three main design features of SNAPION as explained with the help of 3D render prototypes:
A) Timer: The timer ring, as its name says is a trigger for setting the timer for triggering the image capture as per the users wish. The angle rotated is calibrated to corresponding timer values.
B) The trigger ring, is largely inspired from Clapperboard’s open close action. The ring approximately covers the area of the image being captured, which gives the user a fair idea of what the photo would look like when captured, when he looks through it.
C) Each button in the SNAPION signifies a different album in which the captured image would be stored once the toggle button is activated.
Interactions with SNAPION
Prototype
Form and Materials
The shape of the tangible user interface was inspired from the objects that were a part of the context like, the bathing toys, shampoo bottles and other toiletries. However, certain factors the led our team to rethink on the context of use. The tangible was then decided to be amalgamated in a general context of use, that is, this tangible could be used in a dining scenario, a kid playing, cooking, child bathing etc.
A shape now had to be given to the tangible that could fit easily into a context of general use as mentioned above. Inspiration was drawn from objects of daily use like a flower vase, a pen stand, a decorative piece on the shelf etc.
Machinery: Lathe machine (wooden and metal), Drilling machine, Saw, Sand paper.
Material Used: Wood, Aluminum rods, Soft wood.
Electronics used: Arduino Uno, Potentiometer, Resistor, Conducting wires, Unicolor LED.
Final Prototype of SNAPION: Its working
Design Ideation
Behind the scenes of SNAPION production