Week 1 Tutorial

As part of our first tutorial activity, my group (Sewn Designs) and I were asked to bring a series of random tools/items from home. From these items were then asked to consider ways in which we could apply action/reaction to a scenario (using out tools) and have it obtain and/or send information/data to a source elsewhere.

With our tools - toilet paper roll, cardboard, plasticine and some coffee cups, we began exploring the different options of situations where these tools could be used to make an action/reaction device. We first looked at what place of business or certain scenario could used with obtaining data through action/reaction devices; and we decided coffee shops were an appropriate place of work that would have enough data collected over a day to make such devices useful and practical. 

We then began considering what type of data collection could be useful to this type of business. We looked at the number of patrons entering/leaving the store Per Hr/Per Week/Per Month. We then looked at obtaining data in relation to seating within a coffee shops layout - using our tools we looked to create a compression related product that would be placed on a seat and would record a single piece of data whenever someone sat down on that seat (causing the product to compress) when they left, the product would expand again thus completing the action/reaction data collection. This information could have then been used to determine how many people sit down in the coffee shop on any given day, but also which area of said coffee shop was most popular for seating within the coffee shop.

Having thought of this, we moved a few steps further and looked at more useful data for a business - more related to sales and income figures. From this we changed out intended design to something more financially based. Thus coming up with our decided product:

Using the toilet roll and the coffee cups we looked to obtaining data in relation to coffee cup sales. Shown below is what our intended device looked like:

A sensor (the toilet roll) would be placed under each stack of coffee cups (Small, Medium, Large). At the start of any given day the sensor would determine and record the starting weight of each coffee cup stack - thus able to determine the number of coffee cups in each stack. From this, as the day wore on and coffee cups would be removed through the sale of a coffee (be it a small, large or medium coffee) the sensor would record the weight change in the coffee cup stack, enabling it to record data of coffee sales Per Hr/Per Day/Per month.

As a result a company was able to determine their coffee sales across multiple variables - per hr/per week/per month vs. size vs. store location.