Does the average American want an 800 square foot home? What if it was powered exclusively by solar energy? This is the issue that Carnegie Mellon faced in Solar Decathlon 2007, a competition sponsored by the Department of Energy. This project was my first true interdisciplinary team, comprised of designers, architects, engineers and business students. Our goal was to not only design a house that will win the competition based on functionality, but also be successful in bringing alternative energy to the attention of the average person.

With a space so small, we had to maximize the usefulness of every inch. This helped us realize that a smaller space increases kitchen efficiency and we eliminated aspects of a traditional kitchen workflow that got in the way. We also explored non-traditional sizes of drawers and interesting hinges. This was also a materials project. We sought to include environmentally sustainable materials that still have the quality expected from a professional-grade kitchen.

As the kitchen team lead, I was responsible for organizing the team and assigning tasks. More importantly, I met often with the Solar Decathlon project managers, making sure our ideas were carried forward. It was also my responsibility to present our proposal 3 times over the course of the semester to the full team of 50 people. I learned a great deal about managing the politics of an interdisciplinary project.

The image below is the final concept proposed by the Industrial Design arm of the Solar Decathlon Team. Given an area only 12’ x 6’ to work with, we were able to squeeze in a fully functional kitchen. All of the cabinetry is custom-built white oak. The appliances were furnished by Whirlpool as a sponsor of the competition. The glass bar acts as a backsplash and an intermediary step between the space of the kitchen and the living area, creating a place for informal dining as well as serving large groups buffet style.

In order to test our interaction concepts, the kitchen team built a full-scale foam core model of our proposal. This informed our choices about form and scale, and validated our usability reasearch.

In the Summer of 2007, I was hired by GM along with my team members to research the area of computer reconfigurable displays for General Motors cars. Specifically, we focused on the Cadillac CTS and the Chevrolet Impala. We carried out this work in the comfort of a windowless room in the Human Computer Interaction Institute on Carnegie Mellon’s campus.

In the first phase of the project, we went to car dealers to get an idea of what an Instrument Panel (IP) means across as many brands as possible. After we had gathered this information, we spent over a week discussing the past present & future of the CTS and the Impala, and how our digital IPs would help further that future.

Basic Cadillac Display

All the IP's we spied on.

In the next phase, all of the designed IP interfaces based on our conversations and conclusions about the future. The wonderful thing about reconfigurable displays is that there is no limit to what can be shown on the screen. However, we had to balance this new freedom with aspects that are familliar to drivers.

Cadillac display in Sport Mode

Sport mode created some of our more interesting discussions. The driver makes a conscious decision to change their driving style when engaging sport mode. With a reconfigurable display, the car can reflect this change and provide better feedback for a sporty driving style.

Cadillac display in Cruise mode

Chevy concept display

In the final phase, we were given an eye tracking system and built a mock dashboard in order to do visual tests on our designs. However, this phase was a trial run, since a real study was to take place during the fall. However, we did test ourselves and a few subjects on the eye tracker.

Eye tracker

Also, I hope someone turns this into a drawing tablet, thereby making it actually useful. It would also be awesome if I could listen to Pandora while drawing drawing on said tablet. I know Steve Jobs hates the stylus, but a $500 Apple-branded drawing tablet would seriously cut the Cintq down.

UPDATE Core Toon Win!

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I was just reading Ernest Beck’s State of Shelter over at Design Observer. The Haitian earthquake has made an estimated 1,000,000 people homeless. Until a permanent housing solutions can be found, a lot of people are sleeping in the streets and it shouldn’t be that way.

This reminded me of my own quick study in 2005 after Katrina for an entrepreneurship class. My imaginary company, Red House Ink, would develop 4 person, semi-rigid shelters. After researching what aid organizations had been using (and still do for the most part), I decided that a compromise between rigid and pliable materials would be a good fit for a shelter that could house people for several months.

Many of these large scale disasters involve a lot of rain, so I started my concept with a fully enclosed polymer base, tall enough to protect the inhabitants from water running through the camp site. The size of the shelters themselves is a standard unit size for aircraft pallets. My thinking was that these units could be transported with vehicles ranging in size from pickup trucks to C-130 transport planes.

The biggest challenge is not to come up with great ideas of how we can house a million people. The issue is finding someone to fund the venture and as of right now, no one has stepped up.

Bamboo plywood + Blackened walnut veneer + Brass

This radio was inspired by the Gramophone from the late 1800’s. I used this form factor as a way for a small radio to project sound 360 degrees. Inside its guts, a wireless card will allow the user to stream music directly from their computer, as well as listen to normal radio stations (for the purposes of the working mockup, I used an Apple Airport Express to demonstrate the principle). By allowing the the sound to echo in the lower sealed chamber, I was able to maintain the good bass response for which the Tivoli is known.

The mockup radio was a challenge to build. Part of my own criteria for the project was to create a design that I could convincingly build in the shop. I wanted to try bamboo as a base material because (at least from my estimation) in plywood form, it would have similar properties to MDF, at least compared to regular wood. The plywood parts were incorporated for the bass to have something to vibrate. Plywood is often used in speaker design for this reason.

I blackened the walnut veneer using iron oxide. You put iron bits ina jar with vinegar and water, which will rust them in a few weeks. The rust essentially reacts with the wood to darken it. However, this process also dulls the color, so I used danish oil to bring the color back out of the wood.

Radio in context

Detail of the horn. I used brass and hand-brushed the swirls.

A visual map of how people create, carry and share photos.

How do people interact with photos? In a group, we made a grid of all the actions people take with their photos, which were then translated into the map above. Likening the process of a tree taking in nutrients and then creating branches in leaves, we mapped how people take and store photos, sort them and then ultimately display them. After doing the research and creating a visual map of this process, we could then move forward with ideas on how to improve it. As a side note, this map was created before the past 18 months, when facebook finally took over every other social media site as the standard for distributing embarrassing party photos.

My friend Zoë and I used a laser cutter with an attachment for round objects to create some designer chair themed presents. We got our hands on a fancy converter for the laser cutter that automatically rotates a round object. If someone told me laser cutters weren’t designed to make presents, they would be lying.

Though the idea of a touch screen PC is already in the market, the current solutions are still adapting a normal PC to attempt to satisfy the size requirements of a sketchbook. At some point in the process of using the computer to create, everyone has said, “I wish this program would just let me do _____ the way I see it in my head.” Hedron will help it happen.

The inspiration for this project was to take touch screen computing to the next level. I decided that the creative field could best take advantage of the changes in interaction that touch screens can give. The creative process generally starts with a pen and paper, so in many ways it makes sense to continue this familiar action to the next step of definition. With a computer that functions very similar to an old-style drafting board, you won’t be writing a dissertation on it. However, a revisit of the software that designers, engineers and architects use every day might create a more natural experience creating data on a computer. This project was submitted to the 2008 Microsoft Next Generation PC Design Competition.

Below is the product map I create to evaluate the potential market for niche devices. In my research, I looked at how people relate to objects that they “own.” I tried to design a product that would be likely to succeed as an object that people would want to keep for a long time, thus creating a stronger bond than the average electronic gadget and to reduce e-waste.