VEDIKA LALL / WORK / PLAYTE

Playte

Playte explores the relationship between Human Food Interaction, physical computing and interface design. This was built in response to ‘Gizmo’, an academic module at the Royal College of Art (GID).

︎ Tools Used: Arduino, Laser Cutting, 3D Printing (FDM), Rapid Prototyping, C++, Material Exploration (Bioplastics)
︎ Duration: December 2021- January 2022
︎ Featured in: Mold magazine which is an online and print magazine about designing the future of food. ︎︎︎

What if your plate could become an interface?
What if your plate was wired to respond to your intuition?
What if your plate was engineered to do more?

How can artefacts with a high degree of autonomy allow diners to make decisions and discover their positive interactions with food when eating and preparing meals?

Meals have long served as a catalyst for social connection, cultural identity, history, enjoyment, and celebration. They should be encouraged to explore their futuristic experience using all of their senses through the interactive and immersive artefacts just like the Playte.

SOLUTION

Playte is a confluence of Human Food Interaction, physical computing and ephemeral material interfaces. Consider a futuristic dinner where the diner's actions result in more. It's not just about knowing what you eat; it's also about reimagining how you eat. This gizmo is a piece of celebratory technology that enhances the multisensory experience of eating, allows for process personalization, and engages the diner in a variety of ways.

To respond to these inquiries, Playte is a passionate investigation into the use of speculative design in the creation of efficient and intuitive interactions.

Tags:
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Human Food Interaction
Physical Computing
Material Exploration
Information Design
Speculative Design

Mentors:
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Charlotte Slingsby
Shayan Sharifi

Team:
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Hunaid Nagaria︎︎︎

Case Study︎︎︎

Press︎︎︎

Making music with fruits as capacitive plates

PROCESS & PROTOTYPING

TECHNICAL SKILLS

I challenged myself to explore unknown territories using an Arduino and coding and emerged highly confident with my technical and prototyping skills.
Along with physical computing, I explored techniques and emulated fabrication processes that would make food look fabricated and manufactured.
Defined my system to create and manage circuits, and intuitively found my way around it to either fix bugs or make rapid changes.
While working on Capacitive Sensoring, I learned how to envision an input and output relationship.
A constant cycle of trial and error whilst exploring different materials as capacitive surfaces in a quest to find the correct code and material combination.

THE MAKING OF THE BOX

My key roles in the process of making the box were building and maintaing the circuit and realising the capacitive sensing with appropriate material and code.

Circuit Building
While following the best practises for circuit maintenance, I always began with a schematic diagramme. The Playte was built with three servo motors, three capacitive plates with buzzers, one RGB LED, and five LED initializers. To maintain the efficacy, long stretches of connected wires had to be colour coded, numbered, and taped together.

Capacitve Sensors
The Playte insisted on us creating capacitive sensors from scratch rather than purchasing them off the shelf. This was required to detect the hand coming from any direction rather than just one. After several trials, we discovered that;

Aluminium plates worked very well.
Using aligator wires makes the capacitance more stable than most other materials.
The appropriate resistor for this application was 10M Ohm.
To map sound and RGB LED to the capacitive plate, a large surface area and constant iterations were used.
Capacitive sensors can be really unrealible.

Laser cut puff pastry & 3D printed royal icing.

FOOD & MATERIAL EXPLORATION

The food for the Playte is meticulously crafted and modified. It was made with technologies like 3D printing sugar, laser cutting pastry, and building edible praline gears to create a functional food plate. While researching how food and its components mimic actuators' shape and function, speculative technologies such as 3-D printed sugar structures, laser-cut pastry, and edible gears were used to create a functional dessert plate. The designers created an inflatable raspberry-flavoured bioplastic wrapped as petals and moved by a rack and pinion mechanism to simulate movement on the Playte. The mechanics of sugar were investigated as the caramel was formed into delicious yet functional gear trains.

We used Agar-Agar, Gelatine, Glycerine, Water, and Flavoring agents to make the bioplastics. As a result, we were experimenting with various ratios in order to find the best flexible bioplastic. We also discovered that bioplastics shrink over time.

We discovered substitutes for food fabrication/manufacturing. Gears were also created using silicone moulds. To replicate the 3D printing of sugar, syringe nozzles of 3mm radius were used.

Eating the Jelly cubes to initialise the interactions.

INTERACTIONS

Five Jelly cubes line the LED-lit peripheral device and act as actuators for the interactions with the Playte. The personalisation across the Playte begins once the diner starts picking up the jelly cubes to allow interactive play. The Playte imagines an action every time the diner takes up one jelly cube.

The input of picking up the jelly is translated into outputs that bridge the edible and digital domains, powered by Arduino and physical computing.
Buzzers were mapped to a capacitive aluminium plate mounted under the top of the gizmo that gives sound feedback.
The Cotton Candy clad RGB LED, also connected to the capacitive aluminium plate, changes colours based on the motion of your hand.
Another response results in a gingerbread tool spreading the whipped cream quenelle evenly over the Playte.
An olfactory experience enabled by the piezo humidifier. The citrus-flavoured water is atomised to release the mist.