DrawTooth: Smart Toothbrushes for Preschoolers

Local Projects worked with the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA to develop the BioDesign Studio which opened on March 18, 2016. The goal of the BioDesign Studio was to design interactive exhibits to demystify one of the least-understood and most controversial topics in modern science: synthetic biology. The client outlined the basic flow of the gallery, splitting exhibits into two groups. The first group familiarized visitors with the fundamentals of biology, and the second group of exhibits builds on these foundations to introduce visitors to more complex concepts from synthetic biology.

Imagine every designer in every company everywhere putting climate at the core of their creative work. Climate Designers provides the knowledge, skills, and professional network to support designers to be climate leaders everywhere they work

Paper is the simplest and most beautiful way to create on the iPad. It allows you to express your ideas as sketches, diagrams, illustrations, notes or drawings and instantly share them across the web. Ideas begin on Paper.Our lives have become driven more and more by empty patterns of consumption. At a time when we face so many real challenges, we find ourselves using the most powerful technology in our history to slingshot birds and update our status.Yet we all know our most rewarding moments are those we create for ourselves. As people, we have a need to create. It's our calling to invent, discover, and do our best to leave this place a little better than when we arrived. We have an innate need for creativity.To be human is to create.

Street debating is a job to bridge social divides which also works as a social alternative to begging. Street debaters use a set of scales that makes public opinion visible with coins to evoke a discussion with the passerby. This job aims to promote empathy and tolerance in society by creating an opportunity for people to break out of their own social bubble to meet people with different opinions.

Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) kills over 350,000 people every single year in the U.S. alone. It is the leading cause of death for adults over the age of 40 and also leads to the loss of nearly 23,000 youth annually. Despite being a massive public health issue, survival rates have unfortunately remained dismal at around 10% for decades. Fortunately, there’s a treatment for Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) – a life-saving shock from an Automated External Defibrillator (AED). If used quickly, an AED can be highly effective. However, the problem is that AEDs are not readily accessible, and too often don’t get to the people who need them. Avive is on a mission to change that. With each passing minute prior to treatment reducing a victim’s chance of survival by 7%, an AED’s accessibility, design, and usability make the difference between life and death. Our strategic design collaboration with Avive focused on developing a first-of-its-kind connected AED system. In addition to a standard AED’s capabilities, the Avive Connect AED™ is a portable device that, when spread across a community, acts as a mesh-network of coverage enabling support to any individual within the radius of that network. When activated, the network of AEDs and local responders are alerted to find the closest AED to the victim. Once an AED is activated, it provides diagnosis and instruction to both professional and pedestrian users supporting a victim of sudden cardiac arrest.

Nova is a personal climbing wall that redefines bouldering training at home, making it a celebrated activity through a new take on design expression and a compelling interactive interface. Instead of colored holds usually found on regular training walls, Nova uses light to flexibly indicate a variety of climbing routes and difficulty levels. Users can select a route using their iPhone. Information about the training performance is used to offer personalized training. Nova is practical smart gear for climbing and offers various routes for training. When not in use the climbing wall makes use of lighting to create a modern ambience. Thus the design took into consideration two possible scenarios: training and ambient lighting while not in use. The wall consists of panels with pattern-cut-outs that can be scaled to fit different sizes of rooms and dedicated walls. The new experience proudly reflects the user's passion for their sport and lifestyle.

Advances in computer vision and natural language AI continue to unlock new ways to explore the billions of images across our devices, websites, and the public domain. However, it remains difficult to express subjective concepts, such as visual tones (‘vibrant’) or moods (‘eclectic’) to current systems, where visual interpretation is shaped by culture and community and is personal to the individual.

Oasis is a smartphone application for mental support through digital mindtrip. It designs to support individuals in recovering from traumas, creating new connections, and boosting their mental health. It simulated a trip from the desert to an oasis. Daily challenges must be completed by the users in order to advance toward the oasis. The users of this journey not only experience changes in their own mindset, but also the community’s support. Every day’s challenge will be recorded, to witness user’s journey and effort during the days. It will automatically be generated into a personalized diary. Users can view the diary and share them with the community. As time goes by, users will find more and more smiles in their Oasis Diary.

“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” – Muriel Rukeyser, Poet. Everything in the world has already been discovered. But for a child, that’s not actually true, everything has to be discovered from the start. Today, urban children are spending time indoors more than ever before. Parents and educators are concerned that young children are not using their senses actively and don’t have enough possibilities for explorative learning. Current play experiences invite children to look at new, fictional worlds, which causes them to stop using their wild imaginations. With this project I wanted to ask, instead of providing new things for children to look at, what if we could equip the children with new ways to see and explore the world with?

vTaiwan gathers diverging views on various internet-related regulations, then bridges the gap between online and offline opinions by consolidating a rough consensus on new law amendments.