Gus’ brief

The musical bike is a stationary tandem bike that, when pedaled, makes music.  As the back wheel of the bike turns a cylinder with spikes, the spikes hit a piano-style hammer that hits drums. It can be played in an ascending or descending scale or have songs programmed in like on a music box.  This bike will be a part of a playground created for children who have fled Syria and are now living on the Turkish border. The bike was created as one of many musical elements of the playground. Play and music are important for children everywhere, but many of these kids don't have much of either.  

This project builds on the mechanics of a piano. With the piano, a finger hits the key, the key moves the hammer, and the hammer hits the string to make a sound. In our innovative mechanism, a foot moves the pedals, which moves the wheel. The wheel moves a cylinder, which strikes the keys that hit the drums to make musical notes.

There are many benefits to this bike: Since this is a musical bike, we hope it motivates kids to pedal.  By pedaling faster or slower, kids can change the tempo of the music, which is fun. The bike gives kids good exercise. Because it’s tandem it is a social experience as well. We hope that our design helps kids meet new friends on the playground and just makes kids happy. 

Melina Bertsekas:
An interactive, colorful display of flowers that allows the passerby to envision and create their own unique bouquets. A table with a bouquet arrangement able to be altered by the passerby through moving pull tabs holding vases.

As gentrification has slowly made it's way through Central Square, one flower shop has stayed resilient. For 89 years, Central Square Florist has been a respected family-run business that has an incredible catalogue of flowers and services, that today simply needs publicity that catches the attention of the newest generations. Build-A-Bouquet does exactly this! With this beautiful stand, passerby is able to select the flowers they desire most and design their own personal, unique bouquet! How, one might ask? Build-A-Bouquet is a three-story table that displays vibrant and colorful flora, and the top ring showcases movable arrows to the center containing different flowers. The customer simply pushes in the tabs of the flowers they love, and the flowers move to the center! Build-A-Bouquet draws in a more excitable audience to a well-loved Central Square cultural landmark, helping a long-running community business continue to flourish through the hardships of gentrification. Build-A-Bouquet and watch Central Square blossom! :)

Ethan Donaldson:

An interactive, colorful display of flowers that allows the passerby to envision and create their own unique bouquets. A table with a bouquet arrangement able to be altered by the passerby through moving pull tabs holding vases.

A simple pull-tab device that allows people to experiment with different flower orientations and arrangements. A flower display table designed to allow passersby to experiment with different bouquet arrangements by pushing and pulling tabs. The short round table is supported by wooden dowels, which holds up a pull-tab board holding small vases. The table has a tube encircled around the legs to give more balanced support. Below the pull-tab board is a small support-tray for vases (filled with flowers) to slide over. The bouquet display exists because it is a way to attract people to a small business in an era of gentrification, rather than going to a main-stream flower provider, possibly the Whole Foods down the street, or an online flower provider. The project engages the loss of small businesses, and wants to stop gentrification that will cause such. The project helps not only the store owner and employees of the shop, but it also helps the residents of Central by helping it keep its feel of a traditional city neighborhood run by the people that live there, instead of out-of-town owners. The project changes the way people display their products, as well as the way people interact with them. The unique style could inspire another user-friendly interactive Ad. One question that arose was "Is there anything that exists like this already/what is it doing for the atmosphere" The flower shop will be the main consumer of the product, but theoretically anybody, displaying small objects, could use this for advertisement. The mechanism is all in pushing and pulling out tabs filled through the tube-slot, with the item on display. The device is set up for the best user experience because it forces the user to (literally) see the product in different light. The atmospheric perspective you get from it is unique in a user-experience lens. With flowers on display, the bouquet display forces the user to consider different formations and think about the most appealing arrangement. Smell, color, texture, and size can all be factors in making the most optimal bouquet, but also the angle its looked at can be important too, hence the need for it to be walked around and viewed in the round.

Nick Brief:

All throughout the world and especially cities we see graffiti or street art all throughout the buildings, alleys, and other places, these works of art give these cities character and a more urban feel to them which they may have lacked in the past. In Cambridge MA, this creativity is celebrated in a place called Graffiti Alley in Central Square. This alley is the only place in New England where people can legally spraypaint whatever they please on the walls. Many people feel inhibited by the open-ended invitation to create; The Spray Paint Mount allows them to express their creativity within certain parameters. Spray paint cans are positioned on a platform that moves on a track system to allow the user to paint freely in a controlled environment. 

This project works in tandem with Grafitti Alley. It will enable the user to position the spraypaint cans and paint freely on the wall in a horizontal fashion. This project came from, looking at the alley for the first time and seeing all of the different creations all over the place all throughout the alley and thinking about how ordinary people walking through the alley could add to this historic location in Central Square positively. The overarching goal of this project is to help local people become more creative by giving them a jump start into the world of spray paint.

Max Brief:

The world of art is one of beauty, but not everyone is given the opportunity to participate. The spray paint mount opens up this possibility for people in Graffiti Alley, an alley in Cambridge, Massachusetts where it is legal to spray paint on the walls. The project brings people to the world of art by giving a free opportunity for anyone to spray paint a creation. To do this, it has to be taken into account that most people using the project are not well versed in spray painting techniques.

 The final prototype attaches to a pole using circular clamps. At the highest clamp, there is a rail system attached horizontally. The spray paint canisters are within an open-topped cylinder, which is connected to the rail system so the canisters can move horizontally. The project can teach people how to express themselves in different ways. Finding new hobbies can be hard, especially since it sometimes feels difficult to find one that may be enjoyable, but with this creation, people are given the opportunity to stumble upon a possible hobby. Art supplies are expensive, and a lot of people do not have that kind of money to spend on them, so being able to give back to the community by installing this tool is a great way to give new opportunities to those who are less fortunate, but want to enjoy the art of spray painting.

This project is an example of how people can make more interactive art throughout the whole city. Those who will enjoy this project the most are people who need to release some energy, as painting is a great coping mechanism for many. The technology of the project is innovative because visual art does not usually incorporate manual and mechanical work together.  The colors of the mechanism have a soothing effect on them, and blends into the alley well: making sure that the alley’s culture does not get damaged.

    In this studio, we were challenged to make an art piece that kept people busy while they waited for the bus. The first solution we came up with, was making a pedal box under the bus stop seats, that would allow commuters to pedal and generate electricity. This could be used for charging electronics or powering a sign that tells you when the bus is coming. We later pivoted because this was kind of a solitary idea. Although it encouraged you to charge and use your phone, it wasn't really a form of art. So, we wanted to make something that was interactive, communal, and is a piece of art. We split up to come up with ideas, and we all decided on a large cylindrical music box that you could spin around a pole making music.

In refugee camps, many kids do not go to school, and end up not having anything entertaining to do. To keep them interested, and also provide physical exercise, we designed and built a play to power machine that generates electricity as the kids play on it. Not only would this reduce their boredom, but it would also empower them: allowing their play to help the people around them. 

We ran into a few problems in the beginning, mostly revolving around originality. We found out that there was already many play to power machines that existed. Some of them were ideas that we had brainstormed before. We discovered swing sets that generated electricity, see saw's, and others like that.  We decided that it would be best if we made our own playground toy, and found a way to have it generate power. 

There is a generator inside one of the boxes, that spins as the kids are balancing from left to right. There is also a ratchet that is connected to the rod, that causes the generator to spin. 

Despite drawing being very important in children’s development and very important to many adults, many do not have the ability to draw due to a lack of fine motor control and other issues. The solution to this problem is a simple device that allows a pencil to be controlled with large, imprecise movements. A Myo can be used to control a drawing device with simple and easy movements.

DrawingBot makes drawing easy for people who lack the simple skills needed to draw by helping people create art without actually having to hold or precisely control the pencil. The final iteration of the project uses servo motors to move a pencil connected to the servos through multiple joints. The servos are controlled by a Myo. The drawing device was originally controlled by a timing belt and then a gear and rack until we reached our final idea which we prototyped many times. Though mostly complete, the servos movements must be corrected as well as the control system for the device.

Over 1 million children have fled Syria in the past 5 years. While escaping, travelling, and searching for a new home, they are falling behind in schooling. Besides academics, they also have to learn the language and customs of a different country. Our game is designed to help these children sharpen their skill in the four basic operations, become familiar with PEMDAS, and learn how to count from 1-99 in Turkish.

The game is designed to be played by 2 players. Each player has a set of 60 pieces containing an operation and a number and a card with a set of target numbers. Each target number corresponds to one of the rows on the board. The players’ target numbers are different, and each player keeps their target numbers a secret. Each row is a separate equation, and the goal for each row is for the answer to the equation to be closer to your target number than your opponent’s once the row is completely filled. Players take turns placing pieces on the board, altering the answer of an equation with each turn. This means that players will have to calculate the effect of each action taking PEMDAS into account.

We wanted to create a game that would be fun to play while also incorporating math into the strategy. Every time a piece is played, each player has to solve the row the piece is in to know what effect it had with PEMDAS. The more pieces have been played in the row, the longer the equation becomes. Throughout the course of a game, players will have to perform many calculations, increasing their familiarity with operations and PEMDAS through practice. Familiarity with the 4 basic operations will help the children with exponents, geometry, graphing, polynomials, and even more advanced concepts.

In our first iteration of the game, we thought of a Connect-4 type board, with most of the basic mechanics of the game. Before we made a complete prototype however, we changed the layout of the board, so that it was flat in front of both players. Our board was a perfect square, with a 6x6 grid of indents. There was no system for determining target numbers, and nowhere for the numbers to be represented. Each player’s target numbers were hidden from the other player. After playtesting this board, we found that its shape made its orientation unclear. There was also a “parentheses” round once the board was filled in which the players would take turns placing pairs of parentheses in the equations. Each player would have only two pairs of parentheses to place.

In our second iteration, we made the board stand up at an angle. This allowed players to see the board from a longer distance so that they did not need to sit right next to each other. Because it was semi-vertical, we made a little lip so that the pieces wouldn’t fall out. This also made the rows visibly different than the columns. In addition, we tested making each player’s target numbers known to the other player, and the parentheses round was removed because it was too complicated. Target numbers were assigned by target number cards, and each player now had a cardholder that would hold both their target number card and their pieces. The base of the cardholder had six indents which were made to hold five pieces each. However, they were not deep enough to contain all five of their pieces.

In our final iteration, the board sits up in front of both players, like before. However, the rows and target numbers are now color coded so that each row’s target number can be easily identified. We also decided to not make target numbers known to the other player because it removed much of the strategy from the game. The cardholder was revised, replacing the six indents with a trough designed to hold two layers of pieces in a 5x3 rectangle. When not playing, the cardholder can be rearranged into a compact shape and store a player’s pieces. Finally, we decided that because the parentheses round added so much strategy and calculation, it would be mentioned in the rules as an optional challenge.