Timepiece: Connect The Dots

1.  This is a clock I've designed to be placed in my retail space.  The face is made of stainless steel and as the time passes by the faces will rotate and the holes will reveal the numbers beneath it.  The small circle will represent the hours and the circle on the outside ring will represent the minutes.  I was inspired by a wrist watch shown in my earlier post that was designed for someone blind and made use of raised bumps to denote the hour and minute hand.

2.  I worked on stretching my concept of braille even further and began to consider feeling and the nervous system as the blind depend on their sense of touch to read.  The timepiece would be a large design made of wire or string mounted on the ceiling and molded in the shape of the dendrite part of a neuron.  The nervous system would be represented by wires or string and then attached to small, dim halogen lights.  As the lights go off and on, they would suggest  the energy released when neurons are fired.  Every five minutes the lights in the timepiece would go off in succession starting in the center of the dendrite moving outward into the store.  I also considered having the lights go off rapid fire on the hour, but that may be too distracting for customers.

3.  For my final timepiece design I wanted to incorporate the importance of texture that I have through out the rest of the space.  I considered many silly things such a sandbox that customers would mark in with tools and would show time by building up during the time the store is open.  By the end of the day, you would be able to see the masses of people that had visited the store and would be clear to start again fresh the next day.  I also wanted to incorporate this new idea of the nervous system so I thought of ripples in the sand at the ocean when the tides go in because they have a similar branching shape.  There could be some sort of waterfall that would run constant over the sand creating these "veins" in the sand.  However, I think this might be hard to recreate.  I even considered an in store ant farm recessed in the wall as shown in the image above.  The ant farm would obviously change over time as the ants explored new spaces and the tunnels would branch out into the dirt similar to the nervous system and from far away the ants just look like (what else?) dots!
***The color of this image was distorted on blogger, sorry!

A Timepiece

These are a few unique watches for the blind I found online searching.  The first is the Haptica braille timpiece that has a moveable part in the middle that rotates to expose the time in braille.  The second timepiece is the x-watch by Damien Kozlik which tells the time by use of LED lights.  Where the strands cross the numbers converge and show the time.  The middle also has raised numbers in braille.  I specifically enjoyed the last one shown, however, because it is so minimal and sleek.  Time is shown simply by a large dot for minutes and a smaller dot for hours.

Connect The Dots- Material Board

The design for this undergarment and sleepwear store will be based on the concept of braille.  I love the idea of braille because it is a form of communication and it offers a unique texture.  Both of these aspects of braille were important to me and I wanted to convey this within the retail space.  I chose materials with varying textures for the space also to relate to the merchandise.  When buying sleepwear and undergarments the most important thing to me is what the material is and how it feels.  I tried to reflect the braille's dots in other ways through out the space with the pendant lamps and the resin and cocoa cylinders.  With the cylinders, I planned to arrange them in lines with the manniquins on top interacting with one another to suggest the communication aspect of the braille.  I want the merchandise to be what "connects the dots".

Materials Collage

These are some materials that I am using for my sleepwear/undergarment store design.  I based the room around braille so I wanted to emphasize texture in the space encouraging consumers to feel the merchandise.  I also picked a warmer toned flooring with the bamboo to create a more intimate feeling in the store.  If people are buying undergarments they especially don't want to feel uncomfortable in their environment.  I chose a teal color called Shorline Green from Behr to use on the walls in between the braille textured wall flats.  This will help to break up the busy pattern and provide added color in the space.

Connect The Dots...

Braille is my new inspiration for our current assignment in my retail design studio.  We are to create a materials board for a retail space with a given concept.  I was assigned to design a sleep wear and under garment store with the concept of "connect the dots".  From there, I eventually found an image in a design magazine (I forget which one) of a printed wallpaper modeled after braille.  I love the idea of varying textures with the raised bumps and I would like to create a design with differing sizes of braille within the space.