Sunflower is an exploration of new ways to interpret ambiguous information about the world around us.

For my master's thesis at the University of Washington (M.Des, 2015), I designed a bodysuit-based navigational system for low-vision environments called "Sunflower," named after the flower that always orients toward the sun.

MY ROLES

Project Leadership
Ideation
Framework Design
Wearable Design
UX Design
UI Design
Visual Direction
Concept Illustration

People in low-vision environments often meet challenges that cannot be solved by handheld mobile devices. Firefighters work in extremely low visibility while carrying heavy loads. Parents fear a small child wandering off in a crowded public area, lost in a sea of bodies. Students on complicated campuses often bike outdoors, only to proceed indoors where GPS is no longer viable. In these situations where eyes- and hands-free are not optional, how might we use other senses to find what we are looking for? 

I created a Firefighter journey map to understand the navigational pain points and sketched out a ton of ideas that could help alleviate them.

Eventually this work led to the concept of a full-body wearable consisting of a network of tiny nodes that contain sensors, actuators, IMUs, and CPUs to orient a user to the environment. Similar to pixels in a screen, the nodes fire together in swarm patterns to generate haptic feedback from the surrounding environment. Although the uses for a device like this are countless, this project focused on design to impact personal navigation, particularly in low-vision environments.

Sunflower provides both an eyes- and hands-free solution by locking on to a destination within a scanned 3D floor plan of a building and leading the user by touch.

Sunflower generates a pulse that moves freely across the body informing the user of the location of the destination.

It also provides a secondary pulse for decision point assistance to guide left, right, up, or down. As the user approaches the destination, the pulse intensifies like a game of “Hot and Cold” until he or she arrives. Through this combination of pulses, the user essentially feels 3D space.

I roughly prototyped the pulse in a couple of different ways to test whether this pulse idea would be effective. The test results showed that it actually holds a lot of promise.