Anara's Brief:

Spark is a satirical statement piece designed to comment on the overcrowded, fast-paced schedules that many people have today. The set includes three mugs, as well as one base. There is one mug for coffee, based on the Ethiopian Jebena, one for tea, with thinner walls and a smaller handle, and one for hot chocolate that has thicker walls and an ergonomic shape. In addition to the three mugs, the set includes a firepit that all the cups can sit seamlessly on and a fire-starting kit. 

Spark mug is for when the user wants to keep a drink warm, but they don't have access to a heating element. They can use it at work, while traveling, or at home. The concept is sold to office workers and online consumers as a convenient coffee heating device. In reality, using it is quite a time-intensive process. The user has to light the fire, keep it warm, and wait for the drink to heat up. The long process forces the user to take a break from their fast-paced schedule and relax near a fire with a warm drink. Spark is also a vessel for conversation within a community. Each mug is slip cast from a plaster mold made from a 3d print and then fired.

TEO

The Fire Cup is a series of three different mugs that each serve a purpose for separated liquids. One cup is designed for coffee and has been manufactured to look like a mug from Ethiopia and has an origin name of Jebena. The other two mugs are for tea and hot chocolate. The tea mug has been inspired by 1800’s British tea cup designs with lots of color and little details. The hot chocolate mug was made to have a more modern feel. The point of the fireplace to fit all of the mugs is to keep your drink warm while the user is off doing another activity away from the mug. 

Most people are very active, always doing something, which means they have less time to drink their coffee before it gets cold. This product is aimed towards the group of people who are always active and have the time to start a fire and keep their cup warm while they work. 

This product would work by having the user take the particular mug and make a drink. While their drink is being made, the user would have to start a fire in the pit that the mug plops onto. Once the fire is going and the beverage is made, pour it into the cup and enjoy. A large number of people struggle with tasks, and this product could help by keeping a person on task and making sure they do all of what they assigned themselves to do. 

“The Cake Popper” was created to solve the problem of outdoor dining during the Covid era. In this project, we wanted to create something that would ease the anxiety surrounding Covid. “Project name” is a mold for cake pops that can easily transform into a plate to easily carry at a big gathering. The mold has two parts, the top part is used as a presser to help mold the top part of the cake pops, and then the bottom part serves as a plate that is convenient and light to carry around. 

We hope to facilitate playing D&D in larger groups. D&D is a game optimized for small groups of players, when these groups increase in size, gameplay can become tedious and chaotic. The current size of NuVu’s D&D club means that simple tasks like visiting a merchant can take an hour. This means less time for fun adventures and stories. We also hope to make D&D campaigns less intimidating for new players. Our project will streamline gameplay by creating physical objects to represent spells, shops, and character sheets. 

Hunter
A lack of timeliness can have a variety of negative impacts on NuVu students. NuCard is an ID system that models student attendance, promoting student accountability as well as creating a more streamlined system for taking attendance. Every morning, each NuVu student taps their card before entering the space. If the student is late, they are prompted to give a reason for being late. If certain factors are consistently impacting attendance, systems can be put in place to address them. Some of these factors may impact more than students' arrival times. For example, if a student is late, they may not be getting enough sleep, which could result in lower productivity over the course of the day. At the end of each trimester, students receive an email showing their attendance, as well as the most common reason for being late. NuCard will provide accurate and meaningful attendance data to NuVu students and staff. This data will allow coaches to give students more informed feedback and will encourage and reward timeliness.

The system consists of a card scanner, a server to manage attendance data, and three websites to display that data. When someone uses the card scanner to check in the server updates their attendance data for the day. This data can then be viewed either on the current attendance page, the coach dashboard, or that student’s personal dashboard.

Schuyler

NuCard ID is a system that polls student attendance daily, and visualizes data from individual attendance records monthly to be reviewed by coaches and students. After a student scans into the space using their ID card, a box next to their name will light up green indicating that they are in the space. Whenever a student leaves for the day, they scan their card again which changes the box back to indicate that they have left. If a student arrives late for school, they will be prompted to give a reason for their late arrival. These reasons include an option for lack of sleep, trouble with the students' commute or a different reason. Arrival and departure times will be logged, as well as reasons that the student might give for being late. 

Coaches will also be able to view the attendance records, which can be sorted by individual attendance or school wide attendance. Each group will have its own arrival/departure time(s) as well as reason(s), depending on which group is being viewed. Both coaches and students can make more informed decisions regarding attendance using the data that NuCard ID gives them access to.

Designing for Greenery builds on Connecting Homes to conceptualize a mixed-use building with a heavy integration of green-space and urban farming for newly urbanized areas. It aims to continue to solve the ongoing housing crisis in the Boston area currently driving people to find more affordable homes in more suburban areas. Designing for Greenery designs a mixed-use structure for an urbanized and transit connected Bedford and other regions like it.

Connecting Homes identified an example of a potential urban area and identified a methodology to urbanize it in terms of access. Designing for Greenery creates a mixed-use building to integrate commercial retail and office space, housing, and urban farming in one structure, maximizing the ground available. Designing for Greenery ultimately seeks to create a replicable solution for the Boston area, especially as zoning requirements are changing in support across Massachusetts. It explored various additive, joined, and subtractive methods of designing parts of the building through physical and digital methods, ultimately utilizing subtractive areas to create green space with varying conditions. Designing for Greenery includes a design and prototype of a full-scale urban farm supporting Tiny Farm, Big Impact, funded by Beaver’s Alex Cohn Grant.

PROactive is an organization system built to maximize the productivity of people with ADHD. ADHD affects around 11 percent of U.S. children. Using Tkinter to create a basic PC app, PROactive correlates your daily to-dos with your goals and priorities and can help you track big picture progress and growth. In addition, it uses compelling data visualizations to help engage the user. 

https://nexthome.pages.dev/

nextHome will be an easy tool to help college students make their decision on where to move after school. The project is an interactive map that helps a user find out which U.S states are best for them. 

Many students struggle to find out where they want to be in the future. nextHome was designed as a tool to help make that decision easier. When someone opens the website, they will scroll down and see a empty map. Next to the map, they will see sliders and buttons they can interact with. Changing the values of the sliders or enabling a button will make the map appear differently. The map will highlight states which it thinks represents the user's input values. The sliders control things like population density, weather, and cost of living, while the buttons control absolute things like coastline, or protected abortion rights. Unlike other resources, nextHome will be personalizable to fit what the user wants from their next home.

This project, made by Jere Nierenberg, aimed to preserve current cultural practices relating to the economy, through satirical ceramic pieces. More specifically, the goal was to highlight some of the less sensical ways in which people choose to use their money, and shine light on the glorification of making irresponsible financial decisions, focusing on NFTs.

The first piece is a piggy bank in the shape of a meme called “stonks”, the meme is used to (proudly) talk about making high risk financial decisions, with the hopes of huge profit. This piece encourages the evaluation of, and contextualizes, these decisions by contrasting the idea of a piggy bank, a long time symbol of financial responsibility, with a modern symbol of high risk investment culture. 

The second part is a set of coins, portraying an nft on one side, specifically a bored ape, and something symbolic of different economic bubbles on the other side. The bored apes attire is changed to be relevant to the image/pattern on the other side of the coin. The bubbles that are represented are the 1634-1637 tulip mania bubble, the first major economic bubble, the 1840s British railway bubble, and the 1990s Japanese asset bubble. The form(coins) is also a reference to how cryptocurrency is traditionally represented as some sort of coin.