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Floating Balance
Nick Thorn & Trevor McDonald
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Project Identification
Focus Skills:
- 3D modeling
- Client integration
- Arduino
- Conceptual framing
- Physical building
- API tracking
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Project Identification
Focus Skills:
- 3D modeling
- Client integration
- Arduino
- Conceptual framing
- Physical building
- API tracking
Light Drift - Howeler & Yoon
Nutrition Tracking App (Fitbit): The goal of this app is to make you more aware of what you consume and the amount you consume.
SelfieCity:
This computer program can track all of the selfies taken in these cities, determine the assumed gender, assumed age, and assumed mood. More to the point, it displays a lot of information, in the media genre, in a clean, informative, way.
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Re-Contextualizing
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Re-Contextualizing
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Precedents
Nutrition Tracking App (Fitbit): The goal of this app is to make you more aware of what you consume and the amount you consume.
SelfieCity:
This computer program can track all of the selfies taken in these cities, determine the assumed gender, assumed age, and assumed mood. More to the point, it displays a lot of information, in the media genre, in a clean, informative, way.
FITBIT - NUTRITION TRACKING
SELFICITY
Thesis Statement
Floating Balance is a product designed to help individuals on a diet keep track of what they have eaten. Specifically, Floating Balance helps keep track of the servings of food each day, because for many people tracking things like carbs is too challenging. It uses a series of floating ping pong balls to display the data of the servings you have eaten in a graph-like way.
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Refining Project: Developing Data
Most of our dietary health data came from The USDA, more specifically, Myplate.gov. We were researching a way to measure food consumption in a fairly accurate manner but also in metrics that were easy to understand and track.
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Refining Project: Creating a Client
Boe is a relatively healthy 79 year old and strives to live that way for many more years to come. However, there is one thing about his eating habits he wants to fix, his love for oysters. It's not necessarily his love for oysters that's the problem, but he is lacking other parts of the food group. Consuming oysters at a rate of 48 ounces per week, Boe lacks the vital dairy he needs as milk, yogurt and cheese goes poorly with any kind of seafood. He often lacks vitamins A and C as he prefers dark green vegetables over more red vegetables. Of course, supplements are provided, but as Boe gets older, he doesn't want to take the risk of the choking hazard. He gets plenty of grains through hush puppies, and garlic bread, but probably needs to cut down on the wine and tartar sauce. With our product, Boe hopes to keep track of his consumption better and hold himself more accountable when he eats that 8th serving of oysters mid way through the week.
Use Case
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Refining Project: Integrating Feedback
Components to Integrate:
- Coin Input System
- Timeline displaying progress
- Playful aspect
- Interactable Feature
- Organic Shape
- Obtrusiveness
- Expel Negativity
- How does a user interact with our object in a fun and playful way that's different than a digital interface
- Encourage long term use
- Less about staying up, maybe come up, and come down.
- How can you get someone to turn our product on more often?
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Refining Project: Secondary Sketching
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Component 1: Fan Design
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- Number of Blades
- Angle
- Backward Curve
- Real life examples
- Air Flow
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Component 2: Motor Holder
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Component 3: Tubing
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Component 4: Input Design
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Component 5: Ping Pong Balls
Playful, Organic, Colorful
Final Iteration: Combining Components
Motorshield
12V motor
Arduino
Light Sensor
Button
LED
Power Supply
Technical Diagram
Tubing (Acrylic)
Motor Holder (PLA)
Stilts (Wood)
Base Plating (Wood)
Visual Display (Ping Pong Ball)
Fan (PLA)
Render
Final Photos
Floating Balance is a physical object that offers what digital apps don't in helping people obtain a healthy lifestyle. With a series of floating ping pong balls creating a graph-like display, this product gives the user a visual view of their recent food consumption.
In modern society, self-appearance is a commodity everyone strives to perfect, and with that comes the maintenance of personal weight. According to the Boston Medical Center, an estimated 45 million Americans go on a diet each year, and Americans spend $33 billion each year on weight loss products. Floating Balance, although it does not give an in-depth analysis, is a cheaper solution aimed to help track your diet. It lacks the complex numbers and statistics most digital apps use involving macro nutrients (that frankly no one wants to deal with). Users get a sense of their dietary health without spending hours each week tracking it. A user simply inserts a serving size coin to a given food group, and Floating Balance does the rest. The user can sit back and watch the ping pong balls fly into the air.