During a class (Design Thinking) my colleagues (N.F., S.H., and D.K.) and I came up with the idea of a “smart office that allows workaholics to quit work ‘on time’” (using some Design Thinking methods, etc.). Being inspired by critical design we thought it would be fun to create a slowly adapting environment which increasingly makes it difficult to be productive. We came up with some ideas for every taste of masochism (and there are probably way more 😉):
Our first final low-fidelity prototype is a sketch depicting how the Get OFFice could be executed (Figure 2 & 3):
It shows a basic work station (pc, desk, and chair) with some additional gadgets (cube control, flood light, speaker, and clock). The cube control demonstrates the physical manifestation of the of the Get OFFice-System and informs the user about the status. The flood light becomes stronger till the user gets blinded. The same concept is applied via speakers. The chair has some integrated spiks which makes it, after a certain point, impossible to sit and literally get off.
The second final low-fidelity prototype (powered by Figma) is the cube control itself. It is shown by Figure 4- 7.
The cube has four stages: “10 minutes till work is over”, “20 minutes past work-time”, “40 minutes past work-time”, and the final stage “60 minutes past work-time”. With each phase an additional feature gets started and continuously increases.
We also dropped the spike idea in favour of heat control. Simply because it is easier to integrate in a smart home than creating this chair (if anyone wants to do a research project about the chair – text me!).
This brings me to the high-fidelity prototype: Unity. We created a prototype which resembles an office and the four chosen features. With the time passing, the cube starts moving, initiating different phases. Two videos can be found in the folder Recording.
And that’s already the end. The code is available at https://github.com/DPHofer-AI/Get_OFFice. Leave a comment if you want to get in touch with us, share something, have a great idea, and/or also did something similar. Have a nice day 😊