Sagar Sutar

remindMe : A Smart Pushpin

Interface Design, Interaction Design, Product Design

Through this project I tried to design a tangible reminder through pushpins. It the part of Interaction and Interace Design module held at New Media Design department of National Institute of Design.


The Design Process

Concept

In offices and design studios, sticky notes and pushpins are very ubiquitous. This concept has been arrived from my personal experience of writing reminders on post-it notes, when I was working for IT company. Post-it notes are very widely used to write reminders, todos, contact and address information, writing keywords etc. So why should not pushpins be smart enough to remind you about tasks and reminders written on post-its ?

Smart Pushpin concept
Smart Pushpin concept

Research

I done primary research to find out how people use sticky notes and pushpins in offices and design studios. This involved talking with people and observing the environment. I found most of the people still prefer to write on paper rather than typing.

Research on sticky notes and pushpins
Research on sticky notes and pushpins
Precedent Study and Research Papers

I tried to study the previous work done on smart sticky notes and pushpins. I found Quickies and Move-it have already tried to solve the same problem that I want to address. I studied their research papers for deep study of these products.

Study of possible technologies

The biggest challenge of this project is to digitalize the handwritten text. Currently available solutions are digital pens, anoto pens, camera-ocr. Digital pens adds constraint of additional hardware, so I tried to focus on camera-OCR technique for now.

Ideation
  • Ideation sketch
  • Ideation sketch
Interactions and Interface

By adding camera inside the pushpin, I tried to make pushpin as an Interface between physical and digital world. The pushpin is too big at this stage, I want to make it as small as possible in upcoming months. Defining the interactions of user with the pin to capture the photograph of post-it note is challenging task. I am still working on interactions.

Functional Prototype
  • prototype image
  • prototype image
  • prototype image

Credits

Dr. Jignesh khakhar, Arshad Pathan and all those who are helping me throughout this project