It’s simple, and brings about a sense of domesticity. This short exploration, intended for a shared accommodation or dwelling, is a way for its inhabitants to track their collective mood.

House Diorama consists of two parts, a paper model of a typical farmhouse, and six totems meant to visually represent our feelings. Users choose totems reflecting their current mood and the algorithm slowly sorts out a “cumulative” mood.

The six totems do not represent the full range of emotions and only a select few — stressed, calm, curious, neutral, sad, excited. These emotions are captured in the features present in each totem. Rigid and stepping sides could suggest a level of stress, while a lone protrusion amongst a heavy base could suggest sadness.

Each form is optimized to be 3D printed in black filament without supports.

The house is a paper build of a typical farmhouse. It has the gable roof, the wrap-around porch, the hearth and chimney, and paned windows.

Its construction consists of three layers — an outer layer with framed openings, an inner layer for the paned glass, and a diffusion layer of trace paper.

A base, CNC milled out of pink foam, sets the house upon a slight hill, and contains the electronic components as well as a small divot for the totems.

House Diorama utilizes an PN532 RFID scanner along with NFC tags to communicate with the tokens.

While there were complications with directly reading the contents of each chip, the solution was to refer to their unique UIDs instead. The seven byte UIDs could be simplified even even further if two bytes are taken and multiplied, resulting in a fairly unique integer to work with in this scenario.