Voodoo Bear

Voodoo Bear is a project that came out of the Physical Computing class at ITP. Our team, which included myself, Myriam Melki, Sergio Majluf, and Vanessa Joho, built an experience that blends the expected cuddliness of a teddy bear with the playful, semi-nefarious dealings of a Voodoo Doll. 

The experience begins when the user logs into Twitter. Afterwards, he or she is encouraged to do whatever he pleases with the bear.

We built switches in the hands, ears and feet, along with flex sensors in the front and back of the bear that are linked to a text to speech module through an Arduino. When the user hugs the bear (or squeezes his ears, feet or paws) he says a positive (albeit, snarky) spoken response. Conversely, we also stuffed the bear with conductive steel wool and linked the steel wool to a long metal pin. If the user chose to, they could stab the bear and Voodoo Teddy would voice his displeasure towards the participant in real time. 

As a UX designer, my role on this team project was to ensure a dynamic, intuitive experience for the user. Through extensive user testing and feedback, I helped lead the team into crafting clear positives and negative feedback loops. If a user stabs the bear anywhere on his body, a corresponding negative response would be issued. If the user hugged or squeezed any part of the bear's body, it would issue a positive, albeit snarky response. 

At the end of the interaction, Voodoo Bear would tweet something to the user based on an aggregate of his experience. For every stab or hug, a point was added and the tally tracked. As a result, the aggregate of the experience was reflected in the tweet. If the user had an overall positive score, he would offer some sort of complement. On the other hand, if the user just stabbed the bear, and received an overall negative score, she would get a nasty note sent to her twitter handle.

The anticipation the user had in waiting to see what the bear would say/tweet was a highlight for many.

The spoken feedback the bear offered the user was often humorous. Needless to say, we were happy to witness and share lots of laughter from the nearly 200 visitors who interacted with Voodoo Bear during the 2012 ITP Winter Show.