For this week's assigned topic, "Design to Move Tangible," We were tasked to come up with original concepts that were meant to focus on both the input of movement and output display that focuses on actuation. Although this week's assignment allowed us to pursue our own concept with no particular theme to follow except for this idea of motion/movement, it nevertheless proved to be a challenge on my end with all the different range of ideas to accomplish this week's assignment in a short time.

 

My project for this week is called: "Pushy Tree." It is an origami tree that shakes back and forth in response to the user's 'pushing' force exerted towards the Ultrasonic Sensor HC-SR04.

 

My project utilizes the motion of 'pushing' on an almost immovable object; the tree. The project is designed to detect three different phases of the motion 'push' under one significant quality; speed. I have programmed the input to detect whether or not the pushing motion is a light push, medium push, or hard push. Likewise, the output is also programmed accordingly to display different results depending on the forces exerted by the user. 

 

Rather than focusing on interacting with everyday object such as cup, pencil, book, and etc, I have decided to use a tree. A real-life tree has a very simple set of actions; standing, rocking back and forth, and falling. Therefore, the tree fits the criteria of making the output display logically connected to the movement inputs. The input of my project is once again the 'pushing' motion and it is obviously done with the user's hand. To put it briefly in a real-life scenario, when a person tries to push a small sized tree (input), the tree is either going to stay still or shake back&forth depending on the force exerted by the person (output). In the technical aspect, I have implemented an ultrasonic sensor that will serve as the input to measure different phases of the pushing motion based on the speed of the action. And to simulate the 'rocking back&forth' output, I used a servo motor to spin at a very short period of time just to make it seem like it is shaking and not spinning. On top of that, a handmade origami tree is connected to that servo motor to make it more aesthetically appealing.

 

Ultimately, my project is an interactive artifact that simulates what it is like to 'push' a tree with all your might.

 

Originally I had spent 2-3 days working on 2 previous concepts: "Campfire" and "Surveillance" as shown below.

But the problem with the two concept was that they had very poor or little demonstration of the qualities of movement. It wouldn't make sense to implement them as my project because all it is ever doing is just measuring distance from the user. Granted, walking closer to the object will trigger the output, but the input of just walking or moving closer does not really present the affordance of the movement qualities that we were tasked to do.

 

Therefore, I scrapped the 2 previous ideas and came up with 'Pushy Tree' because I knew my project weakness lies within the demonstration of the qualities of movement. But a new and still existing problem appeared. In order to properly demonstrate the qualities of movement, the logical sensors to implement the inputs would be a PIR sensor. But the problem with PIR sensor was it detects even the tiniest movement and it would trigger the output automatically before the action was complete. Unlike other sensors we have worked with, PIR sensors are a lot more complicated to program since their main purpose is to serve as an alarm-trigger system.

 

So where does that leave me? It leaves with just using the ultrasonic sensor; a sensor that measures distance. In another words, I was back where I was with my 2 original concept. 

 

As a result of this dilemma, I improvised a way to combine the measurement of distance (from the sensor) to logically correspond to the intended motion input of my project. To go into more details, I began to realize that when examining the motion of 'push' there is one quality that is always associated with it. And that is 'speed.' Usually when a person is pushing a heavy stationary object, they do it relatively quick because they are using momentum to their advantage to further the distance. Likewise, if a person were to lightly push/shove an object, they do it in a slow manner because they do not want to overexert the object.

 

Therefore, my improvisation was to program 3 instances of the distance; High, medium, and low. High being a very hard push resulting in the distance from the sensor to the hand to be less than 5cm. Medium at a range between 6cm to 15cm. And low to be set above 16cm.