The HUB- Interactive Table to Bring Roommates Closer
We built an interactive product that can be placed in the living room to encourage students to spend more quality time with their roommates. Light color and intensity are used for roommates to indicate their mood and availability. They can access this feature using a mobile application. A treasure trove is designed to be able to share things with their roommates, glass boards to write messages for your roommates, and the product can also be used as a table when they spend time together in the living room while they sit on the floor.
Goal:
The goal of this project was to Ideate, Design, Prototype and Fabricate a High Fildelity Prototype demonstrating the idea for a product.
Role:
In this project, I worked on Ideation, Modelling, and Fabrication of the final product.
Design Question
How can we encourage students living in an apartment to interact and spend more time with each other while having a busy schedule ?
Problem Identified
Students tend to have busy schedules that are different from one another, making it difficult for them to find time to meet with their roommates regularly.
They spend most of their time in the bedroom instead of the living room. This is because they don’t tend to have furniture in the living room.
They are unaware of each other’s schedules and don’t want to keep knocking on their door or messaging them to check if they are free, as they respect each other’s privacy.
Design Requirements
Introduce a product that tells the self-reported availability and mood of the roommates, so that it is easy to know when one or more are free and can plan to do something together.
At the same time, it is important to protect the privacy of the roommates.
As the living room is the place where roommates can meet and interact on a regular basis, find ways to encourage the roommates to come out of their room and spend time in the living room.
Design Solution
Colored lights as an abstract way of representing the availability and mood of the roommates.
Place the product in the middle of the living room, on the floor, to be easily visible from anywhere in the living room, even with their peripheral vision.
The object must be made attractive so that it always attracts the attention of the apartment-mates.
Give reasons for roommates to spend more time in the living room.
Give reasons for roommates to come to the living room.
We always tend to check our mail when we come home, which is normally placed on the table. We can make the product openable to allow the placing of everyone’s mail.
The container can also act as a treasure trove where roommates can leave things that would like to share with their roommates, giving them a reason to come more to the living room.
We always tend to leave notes for each other on the fridge, or on group messages. We can provide a speaker with a button to record messages for your roommates.
Find reasons for roommates to spend more time in the living room.
When roommates meet they often either sit and talk to each other, watch TV/movies or listen to music, study in groups or eat together.
The speaker can be used to play music and also act as a sound system while watching TV/movies.
As most of the living rooms don’t have good lighting, it is difficult to study in the living rooms. So, the colored lights can turn into a bright white light when they plan to group study.
The product can act as a table to place food and other things, and the container can be used to store food while they spend time together.
