Emotional Box

For this project my group was tasked with creating a physical box that elicits a “playful” emotion in the person who interacts with it. The only constraints we were given was the size of the box and that our box should make the person interacting with it “feel youthful joy about the box and its contents”. We started by brainstorming what sorts of things evoked a playful feeling within each us. We also interviewed friends and family to see what other sorts of items and experiences made people feel a sense of youthful joy. After this we combed through the list and chose the elements we felt best embodied playfulness and thought about how to connect them in a cohesive context. When choosing what elements to include we were careful to make sure each thing we chose evoked the same feeling in people coming from different cultural backgrounds. We decided on implementing a playground theme that would include interaction in the form of hopscotch. In order to construct our box we made use of a variety of different skills. We used mechatronics to create the boxes interactions and spray paint and sketching to decorate the box. This project allowed us to see how you can pull on people’s emotions through certain design decisions.

Contributions

I would like to say a special thank you to my project team members, Arijit Nerurkar and Yoonjie Park and my professors Craig Sampson and Nick Marchuk.