IoT Rug

Bauhaus re-design project

Project Overview

The project was to incorporate the IoT into a product designed by Bauhaus. The chosen product was “Carpet for a children’s room” by Benita Koch-Otto. This exercise was to explore alternatives in IOT technology.

My Contributions

The team was made of three people. I helped developing the concept, and create one of the final interactive prototype.

Context

Painter Wassily Kandinsky was a professor at Bauhaus and his theory on color harmony influenced Koch-Otto. The theory discusses the relationship between shapes and colors. Shapes with acute angles have an intensity in characteristics while shapes with obtuse angles evoke a calmer feeling in comparison. Similarly, colors more closely associated with white intensify in energy, and colors similar in value to black bring a calmness to the viewer. Kandinsky declares that combinations of intense shapes and colors and combinations of calm shapes and colors are harmonious.

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Our proposal was to integrate IOT into the carpet to collect data to support the theory by Kandinsky.

The ‘experiment’ was disguised in the rug forchildren to interact with.

The game involved having sets of triangles,circles, and squares light up and change colors.

The child would press down onto the tile in the rug to choose their favorite color and shape combination

By collecting data from many rugs, users can see on line which colors are chosen on corresponding shapes.

Benita Koch-Otto designed and manifactured this piece while attending the weaving workshop in Bauhaus in 1923. The piece is in linens and is 1800mm by 1000mm in size.

ESP8266 Arduino was used as the micro controller and a membrane switch as the sensor’s to construct the proof of concept. The open-source Node-RED platform was the instrument used to move data received and sent by the rug to draw the appropriate graphs and visualize user response