Games of Active Life

The topic of the course in which this project was created was Food & Technology. The goal of the course was to design a product or installation in which the user experience had the focus. The installations were finally presented at Fooddock located in Deventer. Me and my group created the Hunger Game; an interactive dining table. The goal of the project was to increase social interaction while dining, since this is what has become less in nowadays’ society. The table contains four holes under which a plate is placed. Each hole can be closed by a cover connected to a servo motor. Furthermore, every person has a set of cutlery.

The table provides a game in which the users have to collaborate in order to eat. The table detects when someone’s knife or fork has been picked up using capacitive sensing and, according to this, closes a plate of someone else. In this case, another person cannot eat anymore. In order to eat the users have to figure out the rules together to see how their cutlery and plates are connected. The LEDs placed next to the cutlery and in the holes provide help by lighting up the connected elements in the same color.