Project 3 - Notification Toaster

A toaster that augments your phone's pop-up notifications.

Concept Statement

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.

Process

We began this project with dissembled my toaster in order to figure out how the entire system works and designed the basic organizing of the new toaster and the logic of our later coding process. I remodeled the toaster in Rhino and Meijie wrote out the code for the Arduino board. We plan to build out the first model using chipboard and color it with spray paint. If time allows, we are planning to build out the actual toaster using 3D printing.