ITP Blog

Designing the Absurd

Absurd Hotel

Ideation

The ideation process for this one took the longest. We had many ideas but none of them seemed to be useful or unuseless enough to be presentable in this hotel. Our very first ideas were:

• An overhead light for bed that has sliding sides so that the user can close one side and have light on the other side only while reading at night.
• A contraption attached to a bedside lamp that's protruding and can be used to concentrate light in one point.
• An overhead curtain on your bed's headboard so that you can slide into and have privacy while being in the same space with your partner. (We went really crazy with this one and started imagining a whole installation of a huge curtain that the user can slide around and have privacy in different spots in the room, with a light inside and a fabric that's breathable, we even did some research on how to find the right material for it but upon having a meeting with our instructor we decided to let go of the idea because it wasn't serving the purpose of the assignment and also not very practical to make in a week.)
• An ashtray that's designed for rooms that are non-smoking, it has a mechanism that sucks the cigarette in and/or cuts it in half when you put it in the ashtray. (We thought this idea was too specific and not very useful.)
• A modified chopstick set that is presented to you by the waiter, you can choose your weapon depending on the dish and your mood, there are different types of chopsticks, some have containers up at the top for salt, pepper, one has a container and a special design to dispense soy sauce, one has a tiny little grinder for grinding spices, etc. Upon further thinking we thought that this idea wasn't really solving a problem. Although it was one of my favorite ideas that we had out of all of our ideas.
• Chosen Idea: A sleep mask that's an alarm for you to wake up without bothering other people in the room. The sleep mask has a curtain that covers the front, which will roll up when it's time to wake up, it also has vibrating modules placed around it so that you actually wake up via the haptic feedback. It is paired with your phone for ease of use.

The privacy cone, attachable to the bed headboard or as a light fixture The useless ashtray, that destroys your cigarette Many sketches of what's possible in terms of hacking a chopstick The curtain element from the first idea, translated to this new one on a sleeping mask

CMF And Progress on the Finalized Idea

In terms of CMF, we've decided to use a safety goggles as the base of our sleeping mask, we know that a structure is necessary since we're planning to have solid objects attached to it like a rod and a motor etc. It will for sure be a challenge to come up with a form that has a structure but is also comfortable to wear.

There will be an inner layer of fabric covering the goggles and anything attached to it. There will be a second layer with a cushion-like design that both houses the electronics and also makes it comfortable to wear. The material for the rod and the knob will be plastic and we are planning to paint the knob the apple green color to indicate a point of interaction.

I ordered the Seeed Studio Xiao BLE, since it's a very small microcontroller with BLE enabled. I developed an alarm app using Android Studio and Kotlin, it pairs with the microcontroller and sends a trigger message to the modules and the motor to activate them.

The very first iteration of the app's interface A very simple circuit diagram of what we will need 3D printed knob for the interaction, the user can turn this knob to lower the curtain Put things together for the first time, attached the rod and the knob and adjusted the motor speed so that it turns with a relatively slow speed but also strong enough to turn while constrained by the fabric and the wooden handles.