Interaction Design in the Environment

Starting a new category because I’m starting a new project and it needs a home.

For several years I’ve been teaching “Making Things Interactive” at CMU’s IDeATe program with all assignments turned in on the class blog.  It’s basically “Arduino 102” where we take what people learned in an intro to physical computing class and use that to provide interaction to static concepts.

Every year students have said they want to work on bigger/larger projects over more weeks.  I’ve been trying to think of accessibility projects that would work this way and not coming up with anything I’m enthused about.

Then, while thinking about the design of the kitchen in the home we’re building and doing some research, I discovered just how bad gas stoves are for the environment.  I also had a little safety “incident” (as we like to call them) which was more of a kick in the pants to start an environmental sensor project.

I’ll go in to detail in the next post, the one kicking off my “sensor box” project.