I look at interaction from the physical side too. This device is a live, physical display of a user-defined term in their email Inbox. Imagine coming home from work and instantly seeing how much 'Love' you have in your personal inbox. Or imagine being able to keep an eye on how many business-related emails ('@yourdomain.com') you have while reading a book on the sofa.
The goal of my masters project was to explore and develop prototypes to physically display digitally conveyed information like the weather report, the presence of an email from a friend, or the notification of a shipment arrival at home.
I was motivated to conduct my own project after coming across readings and early prototypes from other researchers in the burgeoning technology fields of ubiquitous or 'calm' computing. The idea is that if objects around us can give us bits of information that we are currently getting through our computer monitors, we as humans would be better at using and interacting with these physical, 'natural', methods of display. Unlike information displayed on a computer monitor, the user is free to interact with the information from near or far, in his or her peripheral attention. Furthermore, with the recent avaiability of inexpensive prototyping hardware, like the Arduino and Nitinol wire, iterative development provided an inexpensive and open-ended method.
I imagined devices sitting on a desk or objects in the living room of a home that were connected to the web, displaying information that people want to continuously keep an eye on. I prototyped many tangible computing devices to explore how humans can physically perceive digital information. Exploration into an everyday tangible device framed my masters research and project development for 1 year. These are photos and videos of the developed prototypes.
A final prototype device was created to give a tangible display to a searchable term in your email box. A constant physical readout, based on the percentage of total emails containing the key word, is available. The prototype is fully functional and uses Arduino hardware and a Ruby script to come alive.
