Intention

The Moody Frame is all about connecting to friends and family through the experience of music. Combining subtle light output of the Ambient Orb and the smart, but not intelligent pictures displayed in a smart frame, The Moody Frame turns pictures of friends and family into an interactive IoT device that subtly shares your "music mood" using light to outupt what kinds of music you are listening to. Additionally, if you are listening to a song you really like and want to share with friends, you can press a button on The Moody Frame which will subtly broadcast that to your friends with in a cascade of colored light, and automatically add it to a shared playlist you have set up.

We started off this project knowing that we wanted to create a device that revolved around music. We’re all music lovers and enjoy listening to and sharing music with each other. Music is a powerful tool for expressing emotions and can connect people across languages and cultures.

We also knew that we wanted to create a device that not only connects people but also allows people to communicate with each other.

We started with an idea that we had come up with during one of our in-class co-creation sessions which was a digital frame that cycles through photos of friends and family who we have not communicated with for a certain amount of time. What we liked about this idea was the photo frame aspect which is a throwback to our childhood when special people and memories in our lives were commemorated by being framed. Since we wanted to create a device that connected people, we decided to use the photo frame form where a person can put a Polaroid of the person they want to be connected to in the device.

We knew we wanted to create a device that connects people through music, but felt that creating an audio IoT device would feel intrusive and demanding of our attention, which goes against the principles of glanceability. Therefore, we decided to take music as the input and lights as the output.