For the paper+joy assignment, I started off by asking a few of my friends what brings them joy and logging some of mine. I created an ideation board of ideas inspired by those answers on figma:
And I collected an assortment of paper: (printer paper, lined paper, colored construction paper, a Spiderman poster, butter paper, card stock, and playing cards) to see which paper gave me the best diffusion.
I was most inspired by the ideas of doing a one-line drawing using conductive ink, making a dodecahedron that lights up when I touch it, and making a graphic inspired by one of my favorite animated movies, Your Name.
I discarded the conductive ink idea first since I didn’t have access to it, and wasn’t able to get longer pieces of the conductive ink to work to express what my idea was.
I then tried out prototypes of the light-up dodecahedron idea. I wanted to apply henna to my hands to depict the electricity flow, and layer the copper conductive tape over my hands to have electricity to flow over and into the object. I wasn’t able to get it to work, with the tape or with wire, so I stopped working on this idea as well.
The last thing I tried was the poster inspired by “Your Name”. As one of my favorite movies, it has brought me a lot of joy. The plot of the movie hinges on missed connections, and there’s a scene where the main characters meet that also brings a lot of joy to me.
The first thing I tried was a little prototype with two characters drawn on different sides of paper, and a light behind it.
When I shine a light behind it, you can see both characters together, smiling.
I thought this prototype wasn’t interactive enough. I wanted the person interacting with the object to do an action to bring the two characters together. Hence, I came up with my final idea of a poster that the user folds in order to see both characters together and have the comet lights light up.
I did this my editing the graphic below and photoshopping it to make the double sided image I needed:
and turned it into –>
Then, I made a diagram for the electronics I needed:
And I started building it out!
I couldn’t get all the LEDs to work together, but I did manage to get the red one to work, as is seen in the photo and video:
And here is the image against the window to see the other character:
I think the most successful part of this was the reveal of the two characters occupying the same space. I also like that the LEDs show through and coordinate with the colors of the comets.
In terms of improvements, I think there can be many. Ideally, I would have the electronics on one side of the paper and have a magnetic switch on the other side so that there’s an on/off happening when you fold the paper. I would also print the image double sided so that you don’t see the electronics when the LEDs shine, but only the other character.