Project Title Happiness Vending Machine
Project Statement of Purpose
This project is an interactive vending machine that sells happiness. Happiness here is “those happy moments that can make someone feel happy”. It can be a small incident in life, an interesting pictures, or a beautiful song. You do not need money to purchase the product since “happiness” is one thing that cannot be valued. All you need to do is to stand in front of the machine, raise your hand to collect the “happy power” and wait for a little while. Then, you can use your happy power to purchase a happy moment shared by others.
Nowadays, living in a big city like Shanghai, many people are feeling stressful. They are always stepping into a bad emotional mood that they lose hope and feel sorrowful. In China, there is a popular new word called “äø§ęåā –“disheartenment culture”, which means that people’s pessimistic attitudes towards life is so prevailing that it even has become a culture. The project aims at sharing happiness to every person in the society who needs comfort. The reason why I decide to call it “vending machine” instead of “happiness sharing machine” or something else is that I want to tell people although you should work super hard to get what you want in your daily life, here is one small vending machine that costs almost nothing, one moment that you can enjoy your laziness. You are justified to get good things without paying.
Project Plan
My project aims at producing a vending machine that looks like a vending machine. To make my project come true, I point out several important steps I have to complete in each specific time. The first step is to collect happiness. What I want to do is to use the social website to collect the happy moments shared by my friends ranging from classmates to net friends. Step 1 is due in 11.27 . The second step is to process these information into funny pictures to increase its interestingness. I decide to use a phone app called “butter camera” to produce images. Step 2 is due in 12.1. The third step is to write the code to realize the main part — it you purchase a product, it will show you the pictures or songs. And I will also write codes to add the “happy power system” into the project. The coding work’s due date will be 12.7. Step 4 is to make the vending machine model by use the wood laser cut technology and connect the model with computer by using arduino. The 4th due date will be 12.10. In the following days I will work on adding more instructions and more funny interactions. For example, the way to gain power can be evolved into playing a quick game. The final project will be a vending machine model that will show images of cute images or interesting songs to the users who want to be happier.
Context and Significance
I was originally inspired by a Japanese Cartoon called <Grief Grocery Store> written by Haruki Murakami. In this book, there is a grocery store. If you send letter to it to talk about your grief, the owner will write some advice and encouraging words as a response. Since peopleās grief can be shared, how about sharing peopleās happiness? This book gives me inspiration on the idea of selling happiness.
Then I work on how to find which kind of happiness to sell since happiness is the thing that is very abstract. I have read a book written by Haruki Murakami called <Langerhans island afternoon>. In the book, he raise a concept called “a little happiness in hand”. As normal people living in such a big city, it is impossible to have the chance to experience exciting events like those happening in Hollywood. In fact, most of us lives a plain life that is repetitive and boring. So, it is much more important for us to discover the tiny but good things in our life in pursuit of happiness. In most cases, the reason why you feel upset is that you ignore the good side in your life.
Then I work on deciding what kind of machine I am going to build. Recently I am really addicted to collecting a kind of toy called āblind box”. Blind box usually refers to a small cartoon figure. The figure is packed in a box that the buyer cannot know what the figure looks like before buying it. A series of blind box often includes 8 to 10 different figures. It is fun to collect it because the figure is very adorable. The process of guessing what my figure will look like and unpacking the blind box is exciting and funny. In many shopping marts, you can find vending machines that sells blind box. This kind of “not knowing what the machine will sells to me” adds playfulness in the blind box industry. Thus, I am going to build a vending machine that randomly sell happy moments to the buyers, which make them feel more surprised.
Thus, based on my research, my proposal is that creating a vending machine that randomly sells tiny but certain happiness to those who feel depressed.
My project aligns with our definition of interaction because there is a procedure of “input, process and output” as Crawford claimed . The vending machine interacts with the audience by noticing the users’ action to collect “happy power”, receiving their request of buying happiness, and offer them a funny picture of music as an output. The uniqueness about my project is that it is raising people’s awareness on the tiny but certain beautiful moments in their life. By sharing them an adorable cartoon image, they feel more relaxed and happier. This vending machine create a utopia space that is different from the busy and boring social life. In front of the machine, you can get rid of the busy life and confusing material stuffs, gaining pure happiness without paying money. All you need to do is spend a little time to relax and enjoy the happy moments.
For the subsequent projects, I will add one more function to the vending machine to make it more interactive. The buyer can upload their own happy moments to the machine too. Thus, the project can also work as an illustrated handbook that record people’s various kinds of happiness.
Work Cited
http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0712/c90782-9240823.html