observe.imagine.think.design

[lifethinkt-blog]

Thoughts on “Our Vanishing Third Places” - Anupma

Ray Oldenburg’s article on “Our Vanishing Third Places” in some ways took me back in time. In the article, he says home is our first place, work is our second place, and third places are an escape from both.  He describes them as “informal public gathering places” where people can “gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably” close to home.

It made me re-look at the places I’ve spent most years of my life so far. First,my parent’s home where I grew up, then the place I moved in with a friend after finishing college and then our home now in NY. Interestingly, when i think of these places now it’s not the physical space that occurs to me first but, the time, the people, the memories and how well these places fit in with the stages of life. Oldenburg’s concept of third places holds very different meanings for each of these places.

In the years growing up, our patio, neighborhood streets, parks, and shops were the primary places of social interactions. It all centered around children(me, too back then) playing and their parents & grandparents conversing and sharing their lives at the same place. In my 20’s when I started working and moved to a different city, these third place interactions shifted to coffee shops, restaurants, or a friend's home. Neighborhood common space like parks or interacting with neighbors wasn’t something that resonated with our lifestyles & schedules. There was a shift, it wasn’t anymore about the neighborhood/ community but friends and a convenient location that provided a comfortable space to talk to each other. I’m not sure if these places even qualify the author’s definition of ‘third places’ considering that these were often not close to home and didn’t involve people from the neighborhood community.

When I moved to NY last year the unfamiliarity of the place, it’s people, my own life and lack of friends and family took a toll on my spirit. I found myself lost in the pace and loneliness of the city. The only thing that connected with me strongly was my home and it’s neighborhood. That pace and life was something I could relate to. It gave me solace, just sitting in the park or the waterfront and seeing people take their dogs for a walk or seeing them walk with friends and family gave me a sense of comfort and belongingness for this place. These places, outside the comforts of my home,  filled in the void that I was experiencing with the shift. They gave me a chance to see, smile and sometimes interact and become friends with people I once didn’t know, in a community that was once new and unfamiliar to me. In many ways these “Third Places" made me feel ‘home’ yet again.

[afujitathesis]

Final sketchnote from yesterday’s Framing User Experience class at Frog Designs. Gonna miss this class for sure. #frogdesigns #sketchnoting #final #presentations #draw #sketching #pentel #tombow #pedalpushers #svapod #mfacandidate #gradschool

[lifethinkt-blog]

Surround yourself with right the people.

During the course of my entrepreneurial design class projects, I passively interacted with over 125 people (which includes my Kickstarter backers and STFT community members) whom I'd have never known or shared my work with had it not been part for this class. To add it, I have had the great fortune of getting to know and meet ~ 40 people in-person (during STFT events, coffee meetings, product reviews) or through email exchanges and e-intros. Again, wouldn't have mustered courage to initiate any of this if we weren’t pushed into these projects during the course taught by Gary, Christina and Leland.

My biggest success coming out of this class has been the network that I’ve built during these months. I would continue to build it as I progress my grad school and advance into the industry. It fills in the void that I (and many other international students) faced in the beginning of the class i.e. lack of people whom I could reach out to share my work with or spread a word about it, in a new country. It’s important to have a network to bounce of your ideas, hear comments, feedback, criticism and appreciation before you get it out to the public. As much as I love drowning in my artworks sitting quietly at my desk working online into the wee hours of the night, I also understand the value of 'getting out there' and facing the work you've been putting your heart and soul into. The lack of it was definitely affecting me (considering I was actively involved in startup communities back in India). Every time, Gary spoke about “reaching out to your network” I experienced momentary blackouts. I’d tell myself, which network? I have absolutely no people I know outside of the SVA IxD community. My twitter follower stats stand at 50 or so. And if this wasn’t enough, my introvert self (or whatever you want to call it!) restricted FB network to under 200. It’s a bit more than that now, of course.

Coming back to learning and networks, my biggest learning from these past few months is to lean heavily on your personal connections, your friends and of course, your family. To start out on an endeavor of your own, you need people around you who will stick with you no matter what’s going with your idea/product in the real world. These people are the outlets, sounding boards, ideation partners, and product re-haul partners and may be potential co-founders. And, you simply can’t go without them. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have a solid network together, a network you trust, before embarking on the journey of getting out there (the jump, that possibly takes a leap of faith) and putting yourself in public. You need it. It makes you feel stronger. It helps jump. It helps you grow. And once you jump. Stay cool. Stay humble.

But still, Be crazy. Be Bold. Be you.

[dmxatixd]

With my last entrepreneurial design course just a few hours away, I’ve been reflecting on the experience. My biggest takeaway is the value of collaboration. Even if you’re the one with the idea, find a few people to take the journey with you, because you’ll go further, together! 

[lifethinkt-blog]

second that.

[entrepreneurdesigners]

We’re in our final month of Entrepreneurial Design at SVA and for the past 8 weeks the students have continued to iterate on the course’s second challenge:

Launch a project that rallies a community that is meaningful to you.

For those playing along at home, I thought I’d share a few things to...

[mhaus]

[vinaydv-deactivated20200318]

Cup of #chai #ChaiWallah #tea #vendor #Kolkata #street #burraBazar #India #VinayDV

[lifethinkt-blog]

Last couple of weeks has been a bit like SlowTea. I spent the Snowy-spring break sipping lots of chai and visiting few tea shops in NY city. One of my new favorites during these visits was Peach Tranquility Herbal Tea, a calming infusion of floral and citrus flavors with a tinge of sweetness.(otherwise, I am mostly a caffeine-free chai person, with inclination towards spicy favors like this).  

Over a cup of this tranquil concoction, I had a great time contemplating about the courses I was taking, some career considerations for upcoming summer internship and yes, most challenging of all, learning some code.

On community front, there have been some key challenges and learning.  As much as I believed in the idea and enjoyed exploring and tasting at different tea shops and sometimes even having a impromptu tea conversation with people I met there, the challenge once again was how to reach out to people? What is it that people would find attractive to join this community? How have other people/ groups built and nurtured a similar community. Are there any inspiring people that I can get to the community so that more people can relate to it, which, in turn, might help in building a momentum? This is when I pinged one of my advisors, Sha during a class session at SVA and discussed with him my research so far, some people  who I felt had inspiring tales to share and also ideas around the events that I had thought. We discussed about the challenges I was facing and also his opinion on how someone who is fairly new, a beginner, would potentially start.

One thing that was clear to me by the end of our discussion was: any community building initiative starts with your close circle of friends/ family (if that applies your project). They are they people you should be personally reaching out to, speaking to, pitching to and hope to be part of your community and spread the first word around. For me it was my classmates some of who also happen to be tea enthusiasts.

The second point was about leveraging the existing networks. For me, being fairly active on Meetup and tuned to events around tea, design and tech, I felt that was another channel to explore. So, I started a Meetup (link) group and also initiated an upcoming event for 20th March. I also reached out to the organizers of other Meetup groups that I was part of so that I could reach out to more people in the design and tech community who also happen to be tea enthusiasts. If that’s one of you please join the group and RSVP for the upcoming event here.

Now that I’ve a handful of people who joined the group, I tweeted about it and introduced the hashtags for our community #SlowTea #FastTech. I would really encourage you guys to share your favorite tea-time moments & a quick note on how the very flavor of tea enriched your day!

I am excited to hear from you, explore and taste a lot many flavors in this coming week. Share your flavors & moments with the #SlowTea #FastTech on Twitter, Instagram and let’s start the journey together!

[lifethinkt-blog]

Slow-Tea (#inFastNYC)

To me the craft of brewing and living every sip of tea generates a story, not to forget the cup, glass that you sip from. And I believe, this is no different for anyone who is a 'tea-person'. Drinking tea is a different experience than coffee. It’s not “on-the-go”, it’s not fast. Instead, a cup of tea is about being quiet, contemplative, slow and in some ways a realization of ahaa...finally I’m here!

There is actually no limitation to what a cup of tea can do: rejuvenate us, make us happy, or simply let us experience the feeling of contentment. Being a native Indian, chai ( Indian tea) has been a part of me, it’s been a way of life that I have confided in on one hand and on the other hand, shared with family, friends and even people across age groups and cultures that I have not known before. Having experienced some of the best moments of solace as well as, chai-friendships, cutting across different cultures and social hierarchies (like college juniors, new jobs) over a cup of tea, I truly believe tea is about uniting people in their shared enthusiasm, pursuit and enjoyment of this good brew.

Last fall, when I moved to New York from Delhi to start grad school, I felt, Starbucks (& coffee shops) replaced the neighbourhood tea-shop that I often frequented (at work). I had nowhere to go for those chai-breaks and honestly, no company either. As much as I craved for my cup of chai and shared that with my classmates, I was also getting exposed to the different flavors of tea they embraced. Our conversation, sometimes exposed me to new type of tea, at times about how tea weaves-in different cultures, sharing the “tea-time moments” and sometimes how different tea-shops in New York city make for a great tea-experience. As rich and engaging these discussions were at the moment, I felt there was no place to continue them and pursue our shared source of enjoyment, contentment and relaxation. This is where “Slow-Tea” originated. 

Slow-tea is a community of designers & creative technologists:

- who fuel themselves with tea

- are trapped in the “so busy”, “crazy busy” work-life, projects, deadlines

and in need of those restorative moments and quiet ways of being together, slowing down with a cup of tea and engage in conversations and activities they otherwise don’t find time for. 

If this is you, send me a note/ sign up here and let's have a conversation. May be over a cup of tea? 

[lifethinkt-blog]

It's still running strong.

This one’s straight from the heart, on my experience of launching something on a Kickstarter which i truly believed in and I thought (or may be assumed) that the idea will resonate with many, which didn't happen in the real-world. Well, the campaign is not over yet. It hasn’t failed as yet, I am still going on with it and I think I will live with that ray of hope till the last hour of the campaign. 

And now, that I have come to terms with what I felt my challenges have been, what has gone well so far and whats hasn’t.. I think I am in a good spot to plan my next course of actions which, is a good news!

Here is what I wrote and shared in my class today on my experience so far with the $1000 Kickstarter project. Sharing with everyone who may feel similar to what I did, at some point of their life or may be never.

What was the most challenging part of the campaign?

To me, the most challenging part of Kickstarter campaign was to reach out to people. The fact that I didn’t really have a huge social network over Internet and in the United States sort of restricted my reach to people. It was hard for me to post, repost, post again and then again about my Kickstarter. And frankly, I got over my shy and did that for almost a weekend++ with full rigor. I felt a bit awkward to go with it but then over the course of first week I realized it was an important part of the game. To launch something out in the world is also about letting the world know that you’ve launched something new. The next big thing was to figure out the method to tell to the world. I had already posted on my Facebook, which mostly was telling to my FIRST-DEGREE connections; people who (probably) weren’t part of the Kickstarter community. So first on-boarding them to the concept of Kickstarter and then explaining about my idea, motivation etc. took a lot of time which I hadn’t really anticipated. Moreover that wasn’t translating to increase in the number of backers substantially. Next, where to go? Wake up on twitter, signed in again after a long long time, because to me that was a way people reached out to the world. I did that. As a novice twitter user that wasn’t easy either. I still reached out to every hashtag & every handle that I found relevant. Result, a few favorites. Yes, that’s it. Next what? May be add something to the Kickstarter? That’s where I stand as of now.

What I learnt?

I think the fact that you don’t have a network is not a reason to stop yourself from taking the first step into putting something out there. This was my biggest apprehension and I think, I could get myself out of it soon enough to launch and then keep working on this part. As of now, the campaign is doing fairly with 28% funding and 17 days to go. I’ve some thoughts to update the content and add some more information to it which I plan to do as my next steps.

Where I think I could have done better?

I could have marketed my campaign better and promoted it better. May be, I could have tried doing it in social spaces like bookstores, Apartment common areas and even meet people in person if my social network on internet wasn’t giving a big boost to the project.

Well, it’s never too late. I have some time to execute my learnings and most importantly I have a lot of learnings from my experience so far which makes it so worthwhile. And did I tell that at times I'd wake up in the middle of the night to see if their were any new backers? 

[lifethinkt-blog]

What did Steve say?

A set of “quote-cards” that highlight some of the lesser known stories of Steve Jobs curated from his biography by Walter Isaacson

Launched in the wee hours of morning today! :) 

Excited to see how it shapes up. :)

[lifethinkt-blog]

Launching ideas does bring anxiety.

Entrepreneurial Design/ Week2

Anupma Rajani

I spent the weekend before class 2 (Jan 21st) trying to think deeper about the ideas I had in the first week. I was excited about a few of them but I didn’t feel very strongly about any of those. So, I slept off on Tuesday night hoping to wake up to something exciting. Wednesday morning, the day for class 2, I was a bit anxious. Just to put myself at ease, feel peaceful & hopefully find a direction, I started reading a book with a cup of tea. Again, a thought crossed; new idea.. Probably I should do something with tea and share my love for masala chai with the community. Another idea. Came and went. As I was doing the morning chores, I was constantly thinking of what is it that would keep me excited and engaged for long enough to go through the process of seeing the idea coming to life.

That’s when I had my ‘whoaa’ moment! It was about the book I was reading in the morning, which often served as my source of inspiration and motivation. The book was Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. I have read the book once, back in 2011 when it was released and heard the audio book during my work commutes couple of years ago. I often skimp through this book for moments of inspiration and every time I go through it I find something exciting. Something that feels new, stories that I feel I haven’t read before or may be I missed reading before, just because they are out of my mind space. This isn’t something unusual. Most of us tend to forget things we once read or heard after a period of time unless we go back to them periodically. This is where I felt my idea was a superb fit. I decided to curate quotes of Steve jobs from his biography and right a small story about the context of each and design a pack of typographic cards. Something that’s not a serious read, yet informative, inspirational and definitely a thing for the ones who couldn’t get themselves to read the 632-page book.  I was excited. Super kicked about the idea, I shared it with Christina, my guide for the course and then bounced it off with a few classmates and second years. The response was good. So I let the idea settle in, started thinking of ways to go about it. Got back home and looked for some interesting instances in the book to create a few samples. While, I was doing it, it occurred to me that I was actually dealing with the official biography of an eminent figure. This got me to thinking, whether it would be fine to use it as a reference for my project (with proper attributions, ofcourse)? I mailed my professors and once I heard back from him I was clear. Good to go. This got me back to track and I was excited to pursue something that I’d love to own and experience.

So I’m all set to make something exciting and most importantly go through the book again and this time pick out stories & quotes that people like you and me can relate to and would love to casually go over for inspiration, motivation or simply a good laughter. As of now, I’m done with the few samples, did a small photo shoot this evening. The thought to get to something perfect is what is delaying me to get it out from my Macbook on to the community. But then, I remember professors constantly talking about how it is important to put it out for the community and then refine it as it progresses. They have been repeatedly mentioning to us first step is to get it out and commit the idea to the people. For me it wasn’t coming so easy. Frankly, I did send a few teasers to people in my IM groups and the response was fantastic. But I still felt, what if the world doesn’t feel it as exciting as it is for my family, friends and me. The very next moment I was telling to myself, so what? Worse case, I’d not succeed with the funding but I will still live the ups and down and the anxiety of launching something in the world. And believe me it is totally worth the effort of making all of these artifacts as I gear up to launch my campaign in the next few hours. And then announce on my social & professional networks and let it take off from there while I do refresh---à check the number of backers.

:)

Launching soon. Stay Tuned.

#JustTheNameIsWhatINeedNow

[lifethinkt-blog]

Entrepreneurial design - Week 1

So last Wednesday, Jan 14th, we started with 'THE' class of the semester 'Entrepreneurial design'. I had heard about this class when I went to the school for the first time ever, in the summers of 2014 after being accepted for the course. The entire concept for a $1000 project seemed exciting and challenging at the same time. Exciting because this is something that would push me into actually DOING something of my own as a business. Giving it a shot and learning what it takes to have something delivered to your customers is Challenging, it doesn't come easy. Coming up with the idea of what you want to build and then the process of getting to the final product and being convinced about it by yourselves is the first big milestone. Next, comes the scalability aspect of catering to your customers with the promised quality and within the promised time frame. These were some of my after-thoughts when I heard about this course even before I joined the program. Time and again, we spoke about this in class during fall'14 semester, heard it from the second-years who had fun working on their projects, some skipped their interns and chose to spend their summers continuing to work on their entrepreneurial design project and making it ready-to-ship to their customers. Exciting isn't it? Very fulfilling too, especially if it's you first shot at doing something of your own, like it's going to be for me. 

Back to class, 14 Jan, Leland, Gary & Christina introduced us to the course with a quick outline of what to expect in the next few weeks and how to go about it. To get us started they introduced us a post-it ideation technique, I'll call it "Action verbs & Audiences". This is how it works -- to begin with if you have no idea where to start or what space you want to work in, you put the first 10 actions and 10 audiences that come to your mind on post-its and then randomly pick one post-it from each category and think of a product, an event, a service or an app around it. The exercise kind of opens you to think aloud. Keep aside some set ideas you might have (which may be great, but it's always worthwhile to give a fresh thought at things and may be go back to the old ones if you still feel strongly convinced about them). I had fun doing the action-verb exercise. Some of the combinations I came up with were "Sniffing - Readers", "Tweaking-Loners", "Thinking-Drivers". To me these combinations were exciting enough to think wild. I know on my own I couldn't have come up with these otherwise. Here are few of the pair & the ideas I came up with during this class workshop.

Next, I went through the class readings and the previous year projects. And then again got back to paper noting down everything that interested me, everything that personally I would love to have or create, something I could relate to, games I played as a child. This helped be brainstorm a few more ideas and arrive at themes that were common to those ideas . Memories formed the core of most of the ideas that I came up. One of them is a game often played in families in India 'Dumb Charades'. The game is about acting a movie name & others have to guess it. Here is a link of how it is played. Few other ideas were about documenting trips based on my personal habit of collecting boarding passes, bus tickets, event tickets & even restaurant bills and signing it with a note. And sometimes, having someone accompanying me write a note & sign it. To me that it just a nice way of treasuring that memory and going back to it once in a while. Few other ideas that i came up with included  'photoLike', a card game of your FB/Instagram photos, where the players bet for the number of 'likes' the photo would have got (on the service) and the one who is closest to the actual 'likes' wins the bet and collects the 'Likes' others had put in the bet. At the end of the game the one with maximum number of  'Likes' wins. The idea excited me, i thought it might be fun to make something like this and see how people reacted. I just floated it around with a couple of classmates. They didn't really felt about it as much as I did. Still, I haven't give up on this idea. It is still on my consideration and I see potential in this concept as a way of bringing photos in physical form back in homes & have people enjoy them with a tinge of social media trends. Some others on similar lines where an idea on 'CalendarPost'. 'Time-hop' postcards - a subscription based service to send as surprise memory cards to your loved ones around the same date/ week you met them in the last year or two. Another, area that came up often in the ideation was something to do with my love for tea and food. I thought of this idea, what if I design dinning table matts with recipes printed on them for amateur cooks like me . I could start with Indian dishes and then look at exploring other cuisines based on a few experiments with my friends from different part of the world. Exciting? emm....

As of now, I have a few thoughts or may be a few directions I am inclined towards. I need to probably pick one I strongly feel about and flesh it out to something more tangible and go with my gut before I share it with some people and see how they respond to it. Here are the scribbles from my second ideation.

    Let's see how my first entrepreneurial adventure shapes from here.

[lifethinkt-blog]

Project 'drinkMe - it's been a while'

Testing the feasibility to work with a FSR sensor to measure the weight of the bottle. 

[lifethinkt-blog]

DrinkMe - it's been a while (progress)

I'm late with this posting this progress :(, I had this in word doc for over a week now!

This week my primary goal was get the code working, which I thought  (before I began) was a fairly simple task considering I was pretty familiar using an FSR sensor and the neo pixel tutorial helped me guide through the setup for the lights. The next important thing to figure was the time component, which would activate the colors of the light based on the duration for which the weight of the bottle has remained constant.

In terms of code I first pseudo coded the entire logic as to how I wanted it to work. This helped me breakdown functioning into a set of if condition statements. For the Neopixel library I followed the tutorial in the link: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide/overview

Once I had the code, getting a stable FSR sensor reading was the biggest challenge. Totally unexpected. Remember when I started, I thought I was fairly experienced and sure about how the FSR sensor would work perfectly for my project. Well, from here on I started the marathon exercise of trying various ways to get a stable reading every time the bottle is kept on the base. Before I get to what were the different ways and method I tried, I would like to share why did this unexpected problem arise?

Well, these were the two kinds of FSR sensor I was using:

With the round FSR the bottle would not exert any force on FSR sensor as the base of the bottle wasn’t flat and when i placed the fsr sensor in the center it had no touchpoint with the bottle base. Instead the force was exerted on the points that came in contact with the ground. Incase of the bigger square FSR the bottle base would have some contact point with the sensor and therefore it gave a reading. But, if I changed the position of the bottle the reading would change. I learnt that apart from the position even a slightest movement of the liquid in the bottle would cause a variation in the weight distribution of the bottle and therefore change in the FSR reading. So I tried various ways, sticking a coin on a round FSR so ensure it comes in contact with the bottle, using 3 round FSR sensors to see of averaging the FSR readings could get me closer to what I was aiming it but no result.

So, I got back to the big square FSR and tried to see how I could make that work. With this FSR my goal was to  ensure that the bottle weight is concentrated on the sensor & somehow the position of the bottle is kept the same. To concentrate the weight of the bottle on to the sensor I used 4 bump-ons (which I had from another project prototype) to make sure the bottle base has a solid touch point with the sensor and for the position I resorted to restricting the size of the base. This in a way drifted me from my initial idea of designing a smart base that would work for any bottle but then I figured that I should first get it working for one bottle (may standard 1L bottle) and then see how I could make it work for the other sizes. So I quickly, tested it with code I had. It needed a few tweaks in the code in terms defining the weight of the empty bottle (that had now changed because with the use of the bump-on the bottle was exerting maximum force on the sensor and therefore the FSR reading was higher). Voila, it was working. Here’s a picture of a simulated prototype.

[lifethinkt-blog]

Project 'drinkMe - it's been a while'

Testing the feasibility to work with a FSR sensor to measure the weight of the bottle. 

[lifethinkt-blog]

drinkMe – It’s been a while

A docking station for your water bottle that makes sure your are well hydrated. 

Why I am making what I am making? :)

For the last couple of years I’ve worked towards one good habit and that is to drink lots of water. Partly for the health benefits it has (which most of us have read or heard of at some point of time) but more importantly after a medical experience I had last year. It just made me think how we take simple things for granted and pay little or no attention to them. This realization changed a few things about me, one, you would (mostly) spot me with a bottle of water and second, water replaced most colored drinks for me except for those few times when I’d have a craving for a particular drink.

Another thing it did to me was that it made me a bit more observant about the hydration levels of people around me. At work, I’d often remind my neighbor to finish that bottle of water for hours and then walk with her to fill the empty bottle. It was a good break from work and habit that she was slowly getting used to. Well, I moved to grad school but the idea kind of lingered on, what if there is something that reminded you to drink water once in a while? What if it also communicated to others that you haven’t had water for an hour or more?

To understand the opportunity space, I did an online search to find water-drinking habits in people and found that 75% of Americans suffer from chronic dehydration. In fact, the lack of water is the number one cause of daytime fatigue, back and joint pain and weak short-term memory. For many people, drinking more water is not desirable and it takes great effort to force them to drink a glass of water. This further motivated me to give my idea a shot and work towards realizing it with my most recent learning i.e. explore the world of sensors to engage people with their environments in a meaningful & playful way. I did a quick look around for the existing products in market that cater to this need and found out a few products, which are available. Here are a few of them,

Jomi's Smart Water Bottle Sleeve

New Bottle Cap Reminds You To Drink Water During The Day

THE+HUG from Caktus, Inc.

When I first sat down to put my thoughts, I was clear that I wanted to build something, which is engaging, a playful reminder to drink water and not really a measure of amount of water you have had in a day! As a design constraint I tried to keep it a self-sustained system with little or no reliance on an app/ website.

The initial idea that I came up was to have something like a ring that sits on to a bottle of any size & starts to engage with the user’s context by creating subtle light patterns on the table surface depending on the amount of water consumed. The patterns could vary in intensity and speed based on how much attention it wants from the user (essentially, mapping it to amount of water consumed in a stipulated time). I discussed it with Matt, my professor and we concluded that it’s probably a bit ambitious for me to pursue it considering with the scope of this class.

That’s where I started from again, back to sketch pad to flesh out the design details to an achievable goal as a proof of concept. So I decided to build a drinkMe as a docking station, a home for the bottle at your desk or bedside. This would practically work with any 1L water bottle.

Then, I sketched the logic for the Light+Weight+Time  for the reminder which mostly defined the functioning of product. To put it simply the LED ring Transitions from green to red over a period of time based on the duration for which the weight of the bottle remains constant. I’ve tried to illustrate it in the sketch below, hope it makes it clear.

Once I had a fair understanding of how I wanted to build the reminder I discussed with Matt about the electronic components that I would need. Based on our discussion I ordered the following parts:

a)    Neo pixel LEDS https://www.adafruit.com/products/1138

b)    RTC clock timer https://www.adafruit.com/products/264

To sense the weight, I explored with the Force Resistance Sensor (FSR) instead of a volume sensor (https://www.adafruit.com/products/463), primarily for the cost reasons as I had an FSR sensor already in my kit. I played around with the FSR sensor to see if the weight of bottle could be used as a measure of force it exerts on the sensor and which in turn could translate into an output for the LED. Since I already had the code for this from my class works this was a quick test.

Next, I created some laser cut rings and base for my dock station just to simulate my trials. Honestly, I was really excited to try out the laser cutting machine in the VFL lab so just did these trial samples from the scrap lying in the studio. But in way this exercise helped me get better clarity of the circuit in terms of size, components and wiring and how each would fit in the docking station.

Now that I have the Neopixel strip I downloaded the library from https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_NeoPixel and I’m all set to have fun with the colorful lights!

Next, I am working on code as per the logic mentioned in the details above!

   Till then, stay lit!