Social Robotic Walker
Our third assignment for Visual Interface and Interaction Design was due this week. After rounds of design revisions and a late night on Monday, we finished our Flash prototype and presented on Tuesday.The design brief was to create a navigation interface for a "Social Robotic Walker." Contrary to what immediately comes to mind, the robotic walker is a fairly benign machine. The students over in the robotics department have been modifying a Sweedish rollator for the elderly so that it can park itself and find its position within a building via GPS.
Our task was to design a touch-screen interface for the walker, so that the user could select locations on the screen, and then be guided to their destination by the computer. Like OnStar, but slower and indoors.
I was on a team with Dan Saffer and Andy Ko. Here's a look at our research and design process [PDF 4MB]. We found a direction for our design fairly early on in the assignment. That gave us time to do several iterations of paper prototypes and user tests before turning to Flash for our final presentation [Flash 1.2MB].
Posted November 6, 2003
CMU Grad Studio