E-Ink Symbiosis

With the final project for my Designing Humanity Centered Robots class, my group and I set out to answer a question: how can we create a symbiotic relationship between users?

The answer we came up with was to create an e-ink name tag and mobile interface.

When someone puts on an “I Voted” sticker or an “I Donated Blood” sticker they gain a certain amount of social capital. They have taken part in societally valued rituals and as a result people may treat them with more respect, empathy, etc. We wanted to create this same sensation through technology.

Our scenario is simple: someone has a task they need to accomplish, but they require someone else’s help to keep them on track and get it done. The user in need gives another person a tag to wear. The wearer is motivated to help their friend (who controls the content of the tag’s display) accomplish their goals. As the task progresses, the display shows a subtle progress bar. At the end of the day when the task has been completed, the helper’s tag will display the message “I Helped Someone Today.”

Our project began in a much broader form a month or so before the end of the semester. We researched nudge theory, behavior modification, and the psychology of motivation in an attempt to learn more about how users and consumers are shaped by the products they use and interact with. One idea we had was a “smart” trashcan that would force users to take out the bag when full instead of neglecting the problem. From here we did further research into communal activities, methods and mechanisms for linking two users, and affordances for eliciting certain behavior. This process ultimately led us to our final idea for the e-ink tags.

The tag is built on a Raspberry Pi Zero W connected to a small LiPo battery and a low-power e-ink display. We used a small board, battery, and display in an attempt to make the lightest package possible for wearing on your clothes. We used the Pi’s wireless capability to check a Google Sheet for updates. We designed a front-end interface for the Google Spreadsheet — tasks are entered into the spreadsheet and timestamped. A dropdown menu allows the user to update their progress (25%, 50%, 75%, or done ), which is reflected in corresponding changes to the e-ink display’s content.