This was a project to explore how our products might communicate with us.

The final project of the “Making Furniture Interactive” class at Carnegie Mellon University requires students to make some kind of product with different states which can be triggered based on certain criterion or criteria. I decided to examine the issue of using a product – an exercise machine – that I had painstakingly bought but never really used. What if it were able to communicate with me and remind me that it hasn’t been used in a while? Using the learnings from the class and some simple tools – such as an Arduino board, Processing (computer language), and sensors – I was able to attach a sensor on my exercise machine so that it would let me know when I haven’t used it in a while.