Featured Projects

These are some of my favorite recent projects:

A set of three physical interactions inspired by nature, built to help users relax and escape the stress of everyday life.

Oasis

Stress has always been a problem for people, but since the COVID-19 pandemic started, it seems to have gotten a lot worse. With all the restrictions due to COVID, people are working and taking classes mostly from home now, and that brings a lot of stress into their living space. The idea for this project was to find a way to help people relax and reduce stress levels when working or learning from home. I developed three physical interactions inspired by nature to help people find relaxation and connection to nature in order to relieve stress.

The breathing interaction was inspired by a water drop and the soothing repetitive nature of moving water. When the user touches the globe, a soft blue light will begin to glow and fade in time with a guided deep breathing exercise.

The plant interaction brings nature into your space. It is more than just a regular house plant though. Lights along the front edge of the pot fade from green to yellow to red to show the decrease in soil moisture and indicate when the plant needs to be watered. Also, when the user touches the center plant, lights on either side of it will glow in response to the touch. This can help the user to feel more connected to nature.

The light interaction tracks the time of day. With being inside so much due to COVID restrictions, it is easy to lose track of the time. This lamp glows green through the outer, leaf cut out shade during the day and blue through the inner star cut out shade at night. During sunrise and sunset, the lamp will gradually fade between the two colors for 20 minutes. This helps users connect to their natural circadian rhythm by signaling the rising and setting of the sun.

Image Gallery:

You can find out more about the process of creating this project on my page.

Capstone 2

"Touch Me"

Interactive Sculpture

The idea for this project was to create an interactive representation of touch as it manifests in both loving and violent ways. The first thing I notice about a person in their hands. Hands can tell you a lot about a person. The state of them and the way they move tell you about their lives and their current emotions. In this project, I represented myself with a model of my hand. The wires wrapped around the model emphasize the shape of my hand and show details like the creases in my skin, a scar, and my fingerprints. The hand print wrapped around my hand belongs to a person with whom I have a very complicated relationship. As the wires are touched, the lights will change color. The colors move from a calming blue to a soft orange glow. These colors represent my natural state of calm, represented by the blue, changing to a loving glow, shown by the orange. The blinking red lights happen when all the wires are touched at once. This light pattern looks like a warning light signaling danger. When this happens, a touch has gone from a kind and loving action to an aggressive and violent one.

To make this project, I first made a digital 3D model of my hand with the intention of 3D printing it. I ended up making a plaster cast of my hand instead. The cast did not turn out perfectly, but I spent some time sculpting the plaster cast to make it look better.

The next step was to make the hand print that is wrapped around my hand sculpture. I used a photo of the hand with a quarter next to it for scale. I used Adobe Illustrator to draw in a hand print that matches his hand in shape and scale. I then used a laser cutter to cut the hand print out of a piece of paper. I tried a couple of different hand print designs before deciding on the best one. I then used these paper cut outs as stencils to paint the shape onto the plaster hand sculpture.

Next I added wire to the plaster sculpture. I wrapped three different pieces of wire around the hand. These wires emphasize features of my hand. It shows creases in my skin, my finger prints, scars, and just the basic shape of my hand. The three separate wires do not touch each other, because they will be used to control the lights.

The wires are used in this project with capacitive touch to send signals to an arduino micro controller and control a strip of neopixels that project light onto the sculpture itself. The wires will each control different RGB values to make the lights change colors. When all three wires are touched at the same time, the lights will blink red. To make this happen, I had too write code to convert the value received from the wire to a value that matches RGB color values.

Here is a link to my code: https://gist.github.com/sarahenglish/e1f80ffb713dc07f3d6ebad005a8c3ea

The last step was to create a box to stabilize the sculpture and hide the electronics. The main part of the base is made of a box I found in my recycle bin. The top of the base that covers the lights was laser cut out of cardboard and attached.

This is the final project in action:

"A Look Inside"

Projection Mapping

I am very pleased with the way this project turned out. I used projection mapping to project onto four objects piled on a table and onto the wall behind them. I used this project to represent how we as humans overcome obstacles and challenges in our own personal, everyday lives. The objects on the table represent mountains of these obstacles and challenges. The book shows the stress of school and trying to gain knowledge and complete homework in time to meet deadlines. The STAFF shirt with swirling colors represents work and how dizzying and chaotic it can be. The open backpack with a swirling vortex inside shows the endless weight of all these personal responsibilities that each of us carry. Finally, the mirror shows an image of a face that is not happy with what they are seeing in the mirror. It shows a feeling of inadequacy reflected onto oneself. These objects create a shadow like a silhouette of mountains onto the wall behind. As the performance foes on, the background shifts from a night sky to video of moving colors. This shows that beyond the mountains of challenges we are facing, in a larger perspective there is still joy and beauty in what we do.

"Girls"

Digital Illustration

This project started as a desire to practice and start using my computer to create art. It grew into a series of three pieces that are still some of my favorites. I used HP Sketchpad on my touch screen laptop to create these images. I chose to illustrate images of women to show how unique and powerful every woman is in her own way. I used surreal colors to give these women a sense of magic and mystery in their appearance. I chose women with very different styles of clothing to add variety and I thing the clothing styles also appear to be taken from different time periods. This shows the power of women throughout history, that is not always documented or remembered. The faces of these women show a kind of quiet determination that references the strength and importance of women not only in history, but also in our future.

"Outside Inside"

Interactive plant box

For my final project I created a hanging plant pot that takes in data from a photo resistor and a soil moisture sensor to affect a light display.

Here are some of my initial sketches:

My actual design will be based on this sketch:

The soil moisture sensor and the light sensor (photoresistor) will be installed in the flower pot to monitor the conditions the plant is experiencing. When there is not enough water in the soil, the cloud above will flash like lightning above it at varying speeds to signal the user to water the plant. As the light sensor picks up less and less light the entire piece will have a back light that will get brighter and brighter.

This is an image of my breadboard prototype that I used to test connections and try out the code I wrote:

Here is a link to the code:

Here is a sketch of how I will build the enclosure:

This is the file I used to laser cut my enclosure out of an 1/8th inch sheet of plywood:

This is a sketch of how I will solder connections and put all the electronics into my enclosure:

The electronics inside the enclosure:

The finished project:

The finished project in action:

A little more explanation of this project: