Fantasy device
On class discussion
On September 8th, Chingshuan, Tina and I cooperated on this sketch on class. At first, Tina thought of a device to remind her to tie the shoelace, which is put over the shoes to detect whether the shoelace is tight enough. Chingshuan talked about a door to go to anywhere, just like the cartoon, Doraemon. And I want a device to enable the user to shake hands, play toys or paint on real canvas with a real person’s projection. It might be a MR version of Mozilla hub. Cause Mozilla hub now is not immersive and effective enough.
Finally, thinking of the pandemic circumstance, we want to design a device to open any door without touching it. Though nowadays we have automatic doors with IR sensor. But we still will encounter with some handles of the door or sliding doors that we need to touch while travelling around. And this could be exposure to the coronavirus or other bacterial.
Through the brainstorming, there are two main ways to open every door without touching: One is through sensor. The other is mechanical structure. Combining these ideas, our device could smartly open doors with radio frequency identification, and the shape of the device could help to open other common doors like a key: Hook could fit the round knobs.
Revised Design
After the class, I thought that we should consider many situations and different doors, to meet the demand: open any door. So I revised the main shape of the device to a roll. It could open doors as below:
As the picture shows, this shape could deal with two common shape of doors. And the structure of the device is just like the umbrella. When the user is carrying the device, the handle could be inside the roll. And there is a screen showing whether the door in front of the user is open. If it could not open by sensor automatically, the handle would stretch out, to enable user to hold the shape to open the door by the device. The roll could hold the door’s handle instead of user’s hand. When a sliding door needs to open, the user could press the button to call out the rubber hand stretched out of the front of the roll to help slide the door.
This project could be meaningful, even we have many automatic doors, because if we want to avoid touching every public handle or door, we need this device to help us, instead of tearing down every common door and installing induction door, which could be a waste of money and material.
To further improve the design, we should consider about the cost of the device. Since its function is simple, the whole device should be simple, cheap and light, too. Device should never be a burden to human-beings, so after investigating more user’s feelings about opening public doors and feedback of the sketch could help us to revise it.