Kipum Lee and I are proposing to create a sensor detector and ambient door location indicator for our Making Furniture Interactive (MFI) class. Kip and I are also working together on a team in another class to bring service design solutions to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Neurosurgery Clinic. Our work on that project inspired the ambient door prototype, as it was a concept developed from the research in response to seeing a need to find people inside closed exam rooms. More manual tracking solutions were attempted without success. So the team thought we’d suggest something more automated.

We needed a project for MFI, and we thought it would be sweet to prototype the ambient doors. For this project, we pretty much have to teach ourselves a bunch of stuff we haven’t learned, like how to use sensors to track people and link up wirelessly to an ambient display. But we’re excited to potentially demonstrate the concept to the client, even if it isn’t a component of our final delivered to UPMC. Ambitious? Perhaps. Fun? We hope.