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Design Iteration #1 Design Probe

A project log for Facade: Tactile Interfaces to Appliances

Facade is a crowdsourced fabrication pipeline to automatically generate tactile interfaces to appliances for blind people.

anhong-guoAnhong Guo 09/28/2016 at 21:590 Comments

To test the 3D printed Facade overlay, we first created a design probe---a 3D printed sheet in PLA plastic of buttons labeled with Braille acronyms, attached to the microwave. We used an inverted cone shape for buttons, with the radius of the top surface corresponding to the actual size of the original button, and the radius of the bottom surface smaller. Thus, the design reduces the pressure required for blind users to press on the top surface to activate the original buttons on the microwave. To minimize assembly time, we attached the buttons in a grid with connectors between buttons, so that they could be batch printed, and also attached to the physical interface as a whole. We also made the connectors very thin so that the plastic buttons deform more easily when pressed. All of this design work was done by hand, but in a style that can be automatically generated for Facade.

We tested this design with the same participants from our formative study, and identified the following issues:

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