Project Summary

Flower Connection is a novel visual reminder to take care and nurture those relationships closes to your heart.

In a world that's constantly asking for your attention, it can be difficult to care for personal relationships with family and friends. Flower Connection is a fun and visual device that merges with your phone's call log and keeps track of the last time you spoke to your loved one.

The Challenge

This was the first semester long project that focused on interaction prototyping and design. The challenge was designing a human-centered device that offered novel, playful, and interactive 👀 ways of seeing, 🗣️ ways of saying, and 💥 ways of showing.

👀 Ways of Seeing - Thinking how differently we look at things (how we observe, feel or make things) 🗣️ Ways of Saying - Thinking how we could share and communicate with others in a novel or accessible way 💥 Ways of Showing - Thinking how to present compelling and polished designs

The objectives of this project were to practice thinking about thinkings 🧐, applying design thinking to developing imaginative perspectives through which we view everyday life, using technology as a design medium, and applying the understanding on affordances in creative ways.

Solution

By calling your chosen loved one, Flower Connection’s pedals are positioned in their upright form. As the days pass and you haven’t spoken to your person, the pedals begin to open allowing the LED light to brighten your environment slowly. When you haven’t spoken to your loved one in a couple of days, Flower Connection’s pedals are positioned at full bloom, making the light shine its brightest and giving you a beautiful reminder to give your Flower Connection a call soon.

How it Works

Discovery

Because the main goal of this project was to think about thinking and how to utilize interactive technology to design a novel device, we looked internally to analyze a pain point we were experiencing. My partner and I reached the conclusion that we should call our moms more often. We quickly married our idea and got to work ideating. Both of our moms were born in the month of May, which is the month of flowers 🌹 so we landed on rough idea of our design approach.

Storyboard

Breakdown Board

After ideating, we identified the form, technology, and interaction. Above all, we identified that the flower's pedals would be using mechanical movements to communicate with the user. Mechanical movements was something very much out of our comfort zone, so I took on the challenge of diving into the study of mechanical interactions. It was fun!

Process

We experimented with the petal design and the internal mechanism over multiple iterations and prototypes before reaching our finalized version. Pictures speak a thousand words, here's a chronological process of our semester.