News/Research

Critical Making Projects in Spring 2020 Made @ Berkeley

10 Jun, 2020

Critical Making Projects in Spring 2020 Made @ Berkeley

Projects from Professor Eric Paulos’s Critical Making course have been featured on Berkeley Arts+Design: Made at Berkeley. Jomaneet Kaur, Bowen Wei and Cui Wang’s project, “Bubble Hat,” is one of the two featured projects. The other featured project is, “Sentry,” developed by Jack Willis, Felix de Rosen, and Tiffany Tao.

Great job to both teams!

From Arts+Design website on “Bubble Hat”:

“Bubble Hat” is a personalized health protection hat and wristband accessory to keep people safe in their environment. The hat is solar-powered and voice interactive. It circulates filtered air from the hat in a 2-foot radius to create a sanitary air bubble around users. The hat uses GPS and live environment health index data to determine its LED color. Green indicates safe direct contact conditions. Red indicates an unsafe environment for direct contact and encourages contactless interaction. A lidar sensor is used to detect motion between human interactions, prompting the hat to give feedback and voice guidance to the user. When touching things outside your bubble, the wristband accessory automatically sprays the refillable sanitizer, which dries instantly with bubble airflow. The hat also includes joint attach accessories including music, light, and personalized decorations. Additionally, the hat is customizable for weather, styles, and designs.

To view the project click here!

From Arts+Design website on “Sentry”:

Sentry is an interactive speaker designed to nudge people out of their daily routine by bluntly presenting the ubiquitous and implicit social pressures around them. It invades personal space by hanging at head level, uses a motion sensor to detect when people walk nearby, flashes integrated LEDs to get attention, speaks authoritatively with dual integrated speakers, and retracts up and out of sight with a hidden winch system.

Implemented on the UC Berkeley campus, Sentry underscores our implicit submission to capitalist values–specifically those having to do with the technology industry of the Bay Area–by encouraging students to derive self-worth solely from their success in the tech scene. By plainly articulating strong, implicit social pressures, we hope to make students more aware of, and ultimately less susceptible to them.

To view the project click here!