For Rob Faludi's Physical Computing class, our final project was to analyze a problem and build a solution using hardware and software. My teammates were Katie Koch, Evinn Quinn, Kristin Graefe, and Carmen Dukes. The class was mostly based around Arduino and Processing programming, and with my BS in Computer Engineering it made sense that I took on the programmer role with our limited timespan. I've always had a strong interest in visual programming languages, so this was a great opportunity to dig into Processing further.

We decided to focus on the happiness of students in our program. Everyone was exhausted from a brutal semester and we thought it would be interesting to collect and visualize this information through a physical interface. After brainstorming over input techniques, we considered the concept of Pareidolia — the innate behavior of humans to see faces in objects with coincidental layouts.


We did several iterations and user-tested each of them. Below are two videos of the 2nd and 3rd versions of the project.