Trace

A WEARABLE DEVICE AND PAIRED MOBILE APP TO MOTIVATE EXPLORATION OF YOUR CITY

Collaborators: Jeremy Friedland, Nina Shahriaree, Nina Wei

METHODS AND SKILLS

Ideation, Interaction Design, Prototyping

BACKGROUND

Trace is an app with a paired wearable device that allows you to explore your city in a new and exciting way while not being distracted by your mobile device’s screen. Friends can sketch and send out a visual message in form of a path which is hidden from you until you complete the path. You accept it, walk the path thus exploring and discovering your city via the wearable that guides you and the message is revealed in the end. The idea is to encourage exploration and walking and provide a fun way to communicate. The project was created for Fizz Lab, a directed design group focusing on physical and wearable computing in the Human Centered Design and Engineering department at UW.

PROCESS

The concept for Trace started with the simple idea of exploring your city using a wearable to guide you for wayfinding. From there, we brainstormed unique ways that would encourage exploring new parts of a city. The more we brainstormed the more we realized, most current exploration apps keep the user engaged in screen time by requiring multiple interactions, hindering pure handsfree exploration. We wanted to reduce screen time and this became a driving design principle for further ideation.
Eventually, we landed on the main concept of Trace. A way to connect in a new way with your city, friends, and nearby people all while creating new and interesting temporal works of art.

MOBILE APP
In teams of two we worked on the two components of the concept in parallel; the physical wearable and the mobile app. For the app, we followed the process of sketching out ideas, creating a low fidelity prototype in Balsamic and following up with testing on a few users. Taking the feedback we created the UI and took it to a high fidelity prototype using Proto.io.

WEARABLE
For the wearable after some brainstorming about what it would look like, how the interactions would play out, what kind of feedback would be useful, etc. we decided on something that would be part of your clothing, but easily removable. Something that could be clipped onto the sleeve of your shirt or your shoe. The device would guide the user with haptic feedback for directions. After a few versions with a minimal screen giving feedback, we decided to keep it as eyes-free as possible and used vibration as an indicator of an upcoming direction change and leds to indicate left or right. To prototype this we used Adafruits Flora - the Arduino compatible wearable electronic controller, piezo vibration sensors, leds and conductive thread to sew and connect the parts.