Big news from the TS collective. We have been granted a pot of money as part of the platform4-in-a-box initiative. So now that we are loaded we got to have some fun – and what better to do than make an interactive transformer toilet.
It all started a few months ago at a meeting in relation to the Scandinavian Blip Festival. A small brainstorm on how to decorate Hall No. 1 at Platform4 for the festival, lead the discussion on to the boring looking toilets at the venue. Back in time, Engaard, the proprietor of the place, was more or less forced to install the toilets, meaning that they where put together of whatever materials he had around – not that the fixtures etc. where of low quality or anything, but more that looks did not have the highest priority. So why not make the trip to the boys or girls room a little more exciting – it was suggested. Eventually, we got hooked on the idea and pulled together a team for some ad-hoc brainstorming on the project under the working title “Transformer Toilet”.
Of course the number of ideas where endless; going from inter-com systems between the girls and boys rooms to tracking of urine in the urinal. However, at the end we came up with the concept of a kinetic ceiling that would react according to the movement of visitors. The ceiling would be extended below some modules attached to the real ceiling – effectively creating the impression of a false or secondary ceiling. Sensors would pick up movement and trigger the transformation of the ceiling. The concept is sketched below.
Kinetic ceiling concept
To lower the complexity of the design and to add some more dimensions in the fianl expression, the ceiling would be made up of hexagon shaped structures suspended in wires from the module. To control the shape of the structure each point of connection (nodes) would be connected to a motor. By running each motor in different patterns, the ceiling is transformed dynamically – which hopefully will make the ceiling seem almost organic and alive.
Initial design drawing of the module mechanics
This has been a retrospective presentation of the initial thoughts. At the moment we are a bit further in the execution, but documentation is lagging a bit. In the next post the detailed design will be presented.
