Speculative Design, Interactive Device, Physical Computing
Notification Toaster
This is an experiment using a tangible way to regulate your notification center.
Date
2021 Fall
Related Course
Physical Computing
Instructor
Daniel Rozin
Collaborator
Meijie Hu
Design & Developer Tools
Arduino /Programming
Rhino / 3D Model Prototyping
Laser Cutting / Fabrication
A toaster that augments your phone's pop-up notifications. →
Design Concept
The Notification Toaster is one of our speculative artifact series of 'physical metaphors of digital interactions. By finding the parallel between the moment when a toaster pops up the toasted bread and the notification pops up on a phone, we suggest a new way to reimagine how digital information is presented and consumed.
Using the Notification Toaster is similar to using a regular toaster: users need to put their phones into the phone slot instead of bread. After pressing down the lever, the users wait until they have a new message coming into the phone, and they will see the toast pops up augmenting the notification pop-up process.
Below are several moments that we found to have 'physical metaphors of digital interactions', and we picked the toaster for further development.
Process
Process - Notification Toaster
We used a light sensor to detect the phone's brightness to detect notifications for more real-time and reliable detection. We also replaced the original electromagnet with our own to control with Arduino.
