Mouth Cap

The 2nd day of class, inspired by pocket and purse contents, we form groups and work on diegetic prototyping objects that would exist 5 years from now. As mentioned in a previous post aptly titled an avalanche of ideas... this post will cover post avalanche developments.

Given a change in course enrollment and the natural settling of students during shopping period, I have a slightly different group. Jaap and I are still together and Anzia joins us. We quickly run through all of the ideas we had two days prior, all very practical and emergency related, e.g. vests that inflate during a motorcycle crash, avalanche, or earthquake, the high-tech wall that knows everything in real time and in hyperlocal information and factors in concepts of risk level for disasters of earthquakes, wildfire hazards etc.

But we open ourselves to going in a completely different direction. It seems we're all amused by the critical design approach and consider the amusing ways in which our product could shed light on strange habits and addictions around social media. We toy around with the idea of headwear that grows physically with digital likes - allowing you a way to publically display and show your favoritism and social media following, getting more ostentatious and eventually burdensome they more you're "liked." The idea of the items being balloons makes me think of how you could have a society with entrances door to buildings and floors with no stairs and you'd have to have x number of balloons to float in, based on your social media status.

We settle on a device you'd wear on you index finger that you'd use to physically touch and "like" objects in person or through your phone. An auditory beep would confirm you've registered your like but you'd have no way of seeing or knowing on a trackable or viewable source who liked what, not until the yearly pilgrimage to the "all knowing billboard" (like a Deep Thought from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) where people come to learn that the most like things are not all people. We try to think up a funny top five and giggle at the likely list of: cat videos, Jesus Christ, porn, Beyonce, and avocados.

We think that this product will be thimble like and have a stylus pen-like tip and a scanning pad that reads your finger print. We call it Whadayalike? We think up storylines for how this rat-race social media absorption could ruin friendships, marriages, and result in detox or needing rehab. We picture people habitually tapping in their sleep. But as we're about to head out with plans on prototyping, and when our group found time to meet, we get some new ideas on if this prototype could be more innocuous or even as simple as nail-polish or inking your finger print on things you like. And we ultimately leave Wednesday's less settled on our ideas.

Friday's group meeting to which I could not attend resulted in a totally new idea... a mouth cap that could translate your words into different languages as you spoke and also filter air pollution. Anzia brings our prototype... lip shaped metal frames for our Mouth Cap. We draft our storylines for scenarios where Mouth Cap will be handy and film.

This happens fairly quickly and we have a fun time working on it. And a fair amount of anxiety subsides now that we're finished. Coordinating three people's schedule is tricky, but even more stressful when design ideas change and each meeting is sort of a re-start. I don't mind the process not being linear and think it's unrealistic to ever think first ideas should always be the final product, but with limited shared time to work on a group project with deliverables due in a couple days, I was happy Mouth Cap didn't turn into another idea.