Concept and Significance
We took inspiration from the phenomenon of animism that happens commonly among toddlers and pre-teenage kids. To explain this professional medical term, this is a psychological behavior of thinking that lifeless objects (such as tables and chairs) around us has a soul and will take their feelings into daily consideration. This is a subtle little detail that grown-ups tend to ignore and value poorly yet we found incredibly moving. My teammate and I genuinely love the ideology of caring for items around us as if they have souls because it encourages people to appreciate the surroundings with a warm and gentle heart.
We learnt a lot from our previous projects. From my last project Tales of Visionaries, I made a mechanical thumb. From the most basic layer, I mastered the skill of coding and movement designing a servo, along with applying various materials and fabrication resources in the lab. Comprehension wise, I think that last project reinforced my understanding towards interaction. So in this midterm production, we maintained the extent of high interaction and managed to make it as self-explanatory as possible.
Our project didn't take any existing product in the market as reference, but its usage is quite similar to childeren's toys. In hopes of awakening the inner child in nowadays' grown-ups, we call for attention and gentleness for everyone to everyone.
Concept and Design
We want the user to interact with our production in three ways, using light, pressure and voice sensitive sensors. In hopes of including these three senses, we designed three independent routes of interaction: 1. radish blushes when its hand got pinched; 2. radish yells when getting sunshine; 3. radish leaf wiggles when hearing people talking. We thought of multiple versions of designing that can make these functions come into existence. For instance, we tried to use vibration sensor for route no.3, but it did not work out for the low sensitivity of the sensor itself. To solve that, we souk help from our lovely instructor Viola, who provided the voice sensitive sensor to us as a perfect solution.