Evee

Design brief

This project was a student project aiming to explore different ways on what living in a world full of AI driven products and systems would be like. In this conceptual design project, our group (of four students) focused on imagining what living with personal AI that helps you working more productively and healthy could be like.

This project was part of the ITD (Interactive Technology Design) course followed in 2021. Designing and envisioning the future concept was done with the whole team during weekly concept design sessions. During the project, my personal role was writing the code for (and operating the) numerous Arduino prototypes for weekly testing sessions and design iterations. In the later stages of the project, I was also responsible for building and operating the final prototype for the final exhibition (both the physical and digital aspects of it).

Concept backstory

In a future world where people have widely adopted the use of AI and working from home is the norm, humans are getting busier each day. With the work being more mentally strenuous than physically, it negatively impacts your mental wellbeing. Our goal was to create a home office environment that supports the user's wellbeing while working from home, and in turn to boost your productivity through Evee (our AI).

The future office is going to be in your home. Being in a environment that is comfortable and known to you makes it difficult to balance work and your private life. This has two main outcomes; a higher toll on your wellbeing and a less effective workday. This often entails working longer to compensate for the loss. It is Evee's purpose is to help you feel well and work well during your working at home workday.

What (or Who) is Evee?

Evee is an ecosystem of AI empowered intelligent products. The brain is the main component you interact with, and her limbs are the connected accessories she communicates through.

Every morning she check's in with you asking about your schedule wellbeing, and at the end of the day she closes it off asking about how your tasks went and how you're feeling then. Over time, Evee learns about you and finds patterns in both your wellbeing and productivity throughout your workday. During the day she offers suggestions when you're productivity drops or to boost you wellbeing, like an energizer. She communicates these suggestions via speech, light, or one of her 'libs' positioned in the room. For example, by highlighting items in the room using the spotlight-limb such as a reading chair to change your working posture, a gaming console to suggest a short break, or your water bottle to remind you to stay hydrated.

Interacting with Evee

You can switch Evee on by touching Evee. She also notices when you are in the room and starts glowing softly when it is about time to start working but you haven't started her up yet. Through touch interactions the user can control her (volume level, snooze/mute, Turn on/off, brightness and light color) and with animated LEDs she responds to your touch as visual feedback.

While sitting at your desk, one can interact with Evee through gestures as well so you don't have to stand up and reach all over your desk to touch her.

The things she tracks

The lighting conditions in your room (amount and type of light) Evee will sense using the camera and she will change her brain's color, brightness and temperature accordingly. Next to the lighting conditions in the room, Evee also has to track the user in multiple ways:

Concept iterations

Evee is the result of numerous weeks of coming up with different concepts, building new prototypes for these concepts, and doing weekly concept tests with different people each week. These sessions gave many valuable insights in how people perceived interacting with Evee and about what they liked or did not like about the future concept.

These photo's show a few of the intermediate prototypes used during some of the weekly test sessions.

Final exhibition - preparation

For the final concept exhibition, we build recreated a home-office environment in which Evee and her spotlight limb were installed. I was responsible for writing the custom code and the physical build of both Evee's her brain and her spotlight limb. I also created the structure of the simulated home office.

I build Evee using custom software which ran on an Arduino Seeduino Lotus. I used to Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors to detect the user's hand and the direction in which it was moving. Het spotlight limb. I used a circular LED Matrix for Evee's inner glow, covered with a circular front cover made from diffused plastic to soften the glow. Her limb was 3D printed and consisted out one spotlight, two servo's to allow the limb to turn and tilt around multiple axis, and a simple button to operate the spotlight from outside the home-office.

Final exhibition

The project closed of with the final exhibition to showcase the project to peer students and interested faculty members. This exhibition took place at IDE faculty of the TU Delft. To let participants experience a day in a life with Evee, a home office environment was mimicked for the exhibition. Using the final prototypes created for the exhibition, participants could experience Evee as if it was functioning AI which actually existed.

To achieve this realistic experience, the voice of the AI, the functionality of the AI tracking the participants data, and the interplay between the brain and the spotlight-limb were simulated and behind the scenes. Upon entry the participants were shown a short introduction video to explain the the concept and introduce the experience. Afterwards, the participants entered the home-office one by one to experience Evee first hand.