The assignment this week was to design a playful counting device that sits a top a typical office desk. My first step was to figure out some constraints.
- the device should be able to increment or decrement at any state
- the device should clearly display the current number state
- the device's counting range should at least be from 0 - 99
I thought about what devices we use nowadays to count things and realized... because of digital devices, there weren't really that many instances where we'd actually need a device to count or keep track of things. And I later came to the realization that's because most people already carry a simple counting device:
our hands!
The device would be hand-like device that stands atop a digital LED display. The appendages of the hand would be bendable so that they would be able to be configured into the positions in the above picture.
high five!
fist bump!
The display's initial state is 000. As fingers are lowered or raised, the display would increment between 0-5. However, we need to count much higher than that due to our 0-99 constraint. This is where the high fives and fist bumps come into play.
If the user high fives the hand while the hand has all of its appendages up (high five state), the fingers will automatically return to the fist state. The number in the display, however, would stay the same. This would allow the user to continue counting upwards, and be essentially saving their progress every five increments. The opposite would happen for the other direction. Fist bump and the fingers will raise to a high five position.
The interaction of high fiving and fist bumping are both positive ones. I wanted to give them some sort of positive reinforcement in both directions since Marco and Maria are both trying their hardest to get through their tough work days.