Absurd Hotel: Ice Bucket Diffuser

Team: Vera Zhong and Karina Chow
Course: Designing the Absurd

Contribution: Physical Computing, Fabrication Prototyping

Prompt
Design and develop an Absurd Device/Gadget/SmartObject for the first "Absurd Hotel" to be opened in Japan.
This will be a hypothetical partnership between Kenya Hara (原研哉) and Kenji Kawakami (川上賢司).

Background
“Chindōgu” ( 珍道具 ), a term coined by Kenji Kawakami in the 1980s, is an unusual tool that solves an everyday problem in such a way that may cause more problems than they solve. In order for something to be considered a chindōgu, it must follow the “Ten Tenets of Chindōgu”:

A chindōgu...

cannot be for real use,
must exist,
must have a spirit of anarchy,
is a tool for everyday life,
is not a tradeable commodity,
must not have been created for purposes of humour alone: humour is merely the by-product
is not propaganda,
is not taboo,
cannot be patented, and
is without prejudice.

Examples of various chindōgu

Kenji Kawakami’s book “Unuseless Japanese Inventions”

A chindōgu that solves the problem of applying eyedrops

Kenya Hara is a Japanese designer best known for his work as the art director of Muji. He is also the author of the design books White and Designing Design (Great reads on Japanese design philosophy and aesthetics).

Based on Kenya Hara’s design style, we were given swatches of materials that represented the design system that we needed to adhere to.

Ideation
We went through several rounds of brainstorming for a number of different products including:

A cargo bathrobe with pockets meant to perfectly hold all of your hotel items: room key, toiletries, mints, etc.
A bellboy uniform that has all the hotel keys hanging from it, individually layed out based on in the floorplan of the hotel
A room safe that stores cash that costs money, so that it consumes the cash as it is being used and returns the net change

After pitching these ideas to our professor, every single one of these ideas got shot down with responses of “think more about the interaction” and “think of the problem and form rather than the objects”

Our final idea that we landed on:
Ice buckets are something you only really see at hotels or restaurants. Imagine you are enjoying an ice cold Diet Coke in your hotel room that was chilled in your lovely ice bucket. You take your sweet time and slowly drink your cold Diet Coke and would you look at that, all your ice has melted. What do you do with all that water? Just dump it?

Now, when I think of Muji, I immediately think of their aroma diffusers.

What if... there was a way to recycle the water into a diffuser?

Process
I wanted to jump right in to figure out how the Muji diffusers work, so I did what any logical person would do: take one apart.

From the teardown, we learned that it uses an ultrasonic vibration motor to generate mist from the surface of the water. With this new knowledge, onto our sketch!

The construction is composed of 3 primary sections: the base, where all the electronics are housed, the basin, where the ultrasonic motor is housed and where the water is held, and an outer shell, that houses the ice bucket that sits above the basin.

To better illustrate, these are the 3D models that Karina has graciously created of the base and basin of the enclosure and how these two pieces fit together.

We constructed the outer shell using a 6” frosted acrylic tube, a 3D printed spacer, and an aluminum bucket.

As for the electronics, the ultrasonic motor and air pump is each connected to a TIP120 transistor with each of their base pins connected to an Arduino Uno. There is also a neopixel LED ring attached to the bottom of the basin, and two push buttons to handle turning on and off the neopixel LEDs and ultrasonic motor respectively. For detailed Arduino code, please see this GitHub repository.

Vera L.Z.

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