Welcome Home
This project was inspired by concepts presented in Designing Calm Technology (Weiser and Brown), A Taxonomy of Ambient Information Systems: Four Patterns of Design (Pousman and Stasko), I Just Clicked to Say I Love You: Rich Evaluations of Minimal Communication (Kaye, J. ‘J.’), and LumiTouch: An Emotional Communication Device (Change, et al).
The familiar physical affordances of home, along with the familiar people who also reside at home provide a comforting effect for many people. It is common for people to be welcomed to their home environments after they have been absent for some amount of time: A significant other being welcomed home from work, a child being welcomed home from school, a soldier being welcomed home from war, etc. The comfort that comes from the physical familiarity of home is enhanced by being welcomed from a familiar person after you have been away. While there is no replacement for true person-to-person interaction, sometimes timing or physical distances between people make at proper welcoming impossible.
We can look at the overlying patterns in our activities to arrange a timely delivery of the message. Generally speaking, in our daily lives we transition between work activities and personal activities. There is traditionally a clear separation between the spaces in which work activities and personal activities take place: the majority of work activities occur in the office, the majority of personal activities occur at home, and commutes in between occur in public spaces. The point in your daily journey that is most indicative of coming home is when you open you front door and walk into your home (transition from public space into your private residence) and also transition from work activities to personal activities. At this transition point, a person interacts with several tools (door, door knob, lock, key, and door mat) whose physical affordances can be utilized when activating the ambient TUI to play the recorded “Welcoming”. These physical affordances are also usually interacted with during “operations” rather than “actions” meaning that they are performed almost automatically or unconsciously, and the user will in turn interact with the TUI via ambient input methods in this routine manner.When there is no message in the queue, the door operates as normal and no message is played and the system exists only in the peripheral awareness, so when the system does finally play a welcome message it will come as a surprise to the recipient.
Step 1: User A records some sort of audio file as a welcome home message.
Step 2: User A uploads the welcome home message to the system, the system stores the audio in a queue waiting to be played when User D arrives home.
Step 3: User D arrives home and unlocks the door. An RFID reader reads and RFID tag on User D’s key chain to ensure that the message is delivered to User D and not someone else with access to the house.
Step 4: In addition to the RFID reader, a switch is embedded in the top edge of the door. When the door is opened the switch is released and activates the queue of messages to be played in series to User D’s surprise.
(If there are no messages in the queue, nothing plays as User D enters their home uninterrupted.)
I’ve never used RFID before, but hopefully it works out. If I cant make the RFID work, I may just move forward with the switch activation only, but I think it would be cool to have different users activate the RFID.
On the software side: I am not a very experienced programmer, so allowing people to record audio may be challenging. Worst case scenario, I may have pre-recorded samples to demonstrate the interaction.
I plan to build a mock up environment out of foam core to simulate the action of opening a door.
This project was inspired by concepts presented in Designing Calm Technology (Weiser and Brown), A Taxonomy of Ambient Information Systems: Four Patterns of Design (Pousman and Stasko), I Just Clicked to Say I Love You: Rich Evaluations of Minimal Communication (Kaye, J. ‘J.’), and LumiTouch: An Emotional Communication Device (Change, et al).
Overview
My project proposes to create a TUI that allows people to say “Welcome Home” to someone in their own special way when they are not physically present to do so themselves. People currently send messages to one another via voicemail, e-mail, text messages, or even writing on a fackebook “Wall”. While all of these methods facilitate the means to contact someone, none of these methods controls the environment in which one receives a message. Most communication systems today are pushing to be mobile, this system goes to the opposite extreme by embedding the communication tools the the fixtures of a house. In doing so, we can use events and environment to control the the context in which the message is received for a more meaningful delivery.The familiar physical affordances of home, along with the familiar people who also reside at home provide a comforting effect for many people. It is common for people to be welcomed to their home environments after they have been absent for some amount of time: A significant other being welcomed home from work, a child being welcomed home from school, a soldier being welcomed home from war, etc. The comfort that comes from the physical familiarity of home is enhanced by being welcomed from a familiar person after you have been away. While there is no replacement for true person-to-person interaction, sometimes timing or physical distances between people make at proper welcoming impossible.
We can look at the overlying patterns in our activities to arrange a timely delivery of the message. Generally speaking, in our daily lives we transition between work activities and personal activities. There is traditionally a clear separation between the spaces in which work activities and personal activities take place: the majority of work activities occur in the office, the majority of personal activities occur at home, and commutes in between occur in public spaces. The point in your daily journey that is most indicative of coming home is when you open you front door and walk into your home (transition from public space into your private residence) and also transition from work activities to personal activities. At this transition point, a person interacts with several tools (door, door knob, lock, key, and door mat) whose physical affordances can be utilized when activating the ambient TUI to play the recorded “Welcoming”. These physical affordances are also usually interacted with during “operations” rather than “actions” meaning that they are performed almost automatically or unconsciously, and the user will in turn interact with the TUI via ambient input methods in this routine manner.When there is no message in the queue, the door operates as normal and no message is played and the system exists only in the peripheral awareness, so when the system does finally play a welcome message it will come as a surprise to the recipient.
How it works (Sketch Attached)
This TUI is a tool to facilitate the “welcome home” interaction between two users. For the purposes of this description I will refer to them as User A and User D. User A is the individual welcoming home User D.Step 1: User A records some sort of audio file as a welcome home message.
Step 2: User A uploads the welcome home message to the system, the system stores the audio in a queue waiting to be played when User D arrives home.
Step 3: User D arrives home and unlocks the door. An RFID reader reads and RFID tag on User D’s key chain to ensure that the message is delivered to User D and not someone else with access to the house.
Step 4: In addition to the RFID reader, a switch is embedded in the top edge of the door. When the door is opened the switch is released and activates the queue of messages to be played in series to User D’s surprise.
(If there are no messages in the queue, nothing plays as User D enters their home uninterrupted.)
Possible Uses
- Welcome a spouse home from work while you are traveling or if you are in a long-distance relationship.
- Welcome a child home from school and tell them there are snacks in the fridge while you are still at work.
- Play a close friend their favorite song after you know they had a long day.
- Yell “SURPRISE!!!” on your friends birthday.
- “BOO!” -- scare your room mate
- etc..
Materials to be used
- Arduino
- RFID Reader (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8419)
- 2 RFID Buttons to demonstrate different users http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9417)">(http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9417)
- 1 switch to be embedded in the top of the door (I may replace this with a key activated switch (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10445)...
Potential Implementation Challenges
I’ve never used RFID before, but hopefully it works out. If I cant make the RFID work, I may just move forward with the switch activation only, but I think it would be cool to have different users activate the RFID.
On the software side: I am not a very experienced programmer, so allowing people to record audio may be challenging. Worst case scenario, I may have pre-recorded samples to demonstrate the interaction.
I plan to build a mock up environment out of foam core to simulate the action of opening a door.
