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A traveler using Compass H2O to experience a route: perhaps a famous journey like Andy Warhol's walking tour of New York City, or a personal tour like visiting Shanghai and walking the city with your grandmother when she was a girl, or the familiar, like visiting Amsterdam and following the breadcrumbs (waypoints) your college roommate left there when they traveled last summer.

Extreme Wearables Designathon

On Fri-Sat-Sun June 27-28-29, 2014 the Media Design Practices graduate program (MDP) at Art Center College of Design (ACCD) held the Extreme Wearables Designathon (XWD) in their Wind Tunnel facility on the ACCD South Campus in Pasadena, California. On Friday night we pitched lots of ideas and formed teams. On Saturday morning we played creative games and defined needs. Saturday afternoon, evening & Sunday morning we created Wearable Design Solutions.

Sunday afternoon a panel of judges awarded prizes to the top 3 teams:
• 1st: Emoty – connecting kids with autism
• 2nd: Allia – paying attention, to attention
• 3rd: Compass H2O – ephemeral wayfinding

David, Glenn, Sharon, Susan, Vivia & Samy discuss wearable design.

David, Glenn, Sharon, Susan, Vivia & Samy discuss wearable design.


These top 3 winners won the right to refine their projects and present them at Wearable Tech LA on July 17, 2014.

Compass H2O

Here are a few helpful pages on this Compass H2O Development Website:
• Wearable Tech LA Presentation Slides
• Compass H2O Gizmodo Feature
• Concept: Ephemeral Wayfinding
• XWD Team Presentations
• 1st Gen Compass H2O Find Water story
• Hirez images of Compass H2O
• Team Photo by Sangli Li

Here is the content of this Compass H2O Development Website sorted by a few key categories:
| Phase 2 | Ideas | Research | Photos | Videos | Misc |

Team

Compass H2O team members standing next to the stage at final presentations at Extreme Wearables Designathon at Art Center Media Design Program at the Wind Tunnel

David, Susan, Natalia, Vivia & Joseph presenting Compass H2O at Extreme Wearables Designathon at Art Center MDP Wind Tunnel, Sunday June 29, 2014

David Wang is a staff engineer of Qualcomm Technology Inc. working on projects to develop industry-leas multi-mode modem chipsets for smartphone and tablet.

Glenn Zucman is a new media & identity artist. He teaches at the School of Art at Long Beach State.

Joseph Kan is a industrial designer with a product design background at Art Center College of Design.

Natalia Fedner is a haute couture fashion designer who has worked in Paris, New York & Los Angeles.

Samy Kamkar is a hacker and security analyst. In 2013 he created Zombie Drone software allowing one drone to hijack another.

Sharon Gong is a senior business system analyst of Newegg Inc, in charge of all mobile channels including one mobile site and seven mobile apps for different platforms.

photo of Vivia & Sharon smiling after the Extreme Wearables Designathon presentation for Compass H2O

Vivia & Sharon

Susan Zhang is an industrial designer who is working on her second bachelor’s degree in product design at Art Center College of Design.

Vivia Liu is an integrated designer and creative explorer, who has not only aesthetic communication, modeling abilities, and Chinese user probe, but also hand on experience with engineering and manufacturing process.

Hirez Images

Hirez images of Compass H2O are available on the Gizmodo Feature page.

Terms of Use

Our plan is for Compass H2O to be an open source project. Development materials will probably be on GitHub & the content of this site will probably have a Creative Commons license. However the whole project is brand new and those details are not yet finalized. If you’re interested in using any of our code, hardware, images, text, or ideas, check back soon. Or drop us a note via our contact form.

David, Susan & Samy going over slides a few minutes before our Sunday afternoon presentation at the MDP Wind Tunnel.

David, Susan & Samy going over slides a few minutes before our Sunday afternoon presentation at the MDP Wind Tunnel.

Thank You!

There are so many people to thank for this short, whirlwind Team & Design experience in Wearable Tech!

• The Organizations: MDP, ACCD, Intel Make it Wearable, Wearable Tech LA, unicef innovation, CRASH Space, MakerCityLA, Gizmodo.

• The Jurors: Anne Burdick, MDP; Maggie Hendrie, ACCD Interaction Design; Christian Denhart, Karten Design; Eric Lewallen, Intel; Marcus O. Filipovich, Pasadena Angels, The Design Accelerator.

• The Experts: Hruby McHugh, Illuminode; Magdalena Paluch, Trends & Innovation Strategist, Toyota; Carlyn Maw, CRASH Space; Meg Grant, Designer-Technologist-Maker; Mileece, Experience Designer, Sonic Artist, Renewable Energy Ambassador.

• The Coordinator: Courtney Peterson, MDP Coordinator, ACCD

• The Everything: Syuzi Pakchyan. Our leader-mentor-collaborator-critic-guru-cheerleader Syuzi Pakchyan was overwhelming in her dedication, support, intelligence, intuition, generosity, and patience. It’s hard to imagine anyone facilitating a better experience.

Samy Kamkar, Meg Grant & Syuzi Pakchyan in conversation at Extreme Wearables Designathon 2014 at Art Center, Media Design Program, Wind Tunnel

Samy working through ideas with a little assistance from the endlessly helpful Meg Grant & Syuzi Pakchyan

Saturday morning when we played our development game our newly formed team of 8 had a tough time converging on an idea, or even generating compelling ideas at all. Every time Syuzi and Magdalena came by our station I always felt so utterly hopeless for the progress we hadn’t made and was slowly admitting to myself that we were going to be the one team that was simply a total fail. In spite of our lack of progress, Syuzi & Magdalena were endlessly patient and supportive and helped us eventually find a use case that all 8 of us were passionate about.

It was a great relief in the week after XWD to talk with Charmy Chu from the 1st place Emoty team and learn that they had been equally “hopeless” and that she’d felt equally disappointing when Syuzi & Magdalena came to check on their progress. 25 hours later I found Emoty’s use case to be truly sublime, and the judges’ response to their presentation was palpable, even in the cavernous MDP Wind Tunnel.

Credits

Photo of Team Compass H2O on the roof of the MDP (Art Center College of Design, Media Design Practices) "Wind Tunnel" rooftop.

Natalia, Joseph, Samy, David, Vivia, Glenn, Sharon & Susan display their 3rd place prizes as Samy presents the Compass H2O wristband. Photo by Sangli Li | Media Design Practices @ Art Center College of Design

• The background image on this site is a Creative Commons Flickr image from Chris called My Introduction to the World of LEDS!!!!

• The soundtrack on our Compass H2O Countdown video is a Creative Commons CCMixter track from WaxMaps called Arms of Light

• Credits for the images for our WearableTechLA intro slides on Ephemeral Wayfinding are on our WearableTechLA Intro Slides page.