Orbit: Growing Together
- Organization
- Carnegie Mellon University
Interaction Design - Role
- Interaction design
Concept development
Physical prototyping - Collaborators
- Dorcas Lin
Franklin Guttman - Duration
- 2021
Orbit is an interactive wall speaker for two people who live apart. One person shares a song, the other reacts to it, and the speaker turns that exchange into light. Over months the reactions build up into a record of the relationship you can see from across the room.
We were trying to work out how a close relationship survives losing the in-person part of itself. Texting keeps you in contact, but it leaves nothing behind. We wanted something that held onto the feeling of a friendship and got richer the longer it went on.
It's an interaction study about music as a way of being present at a distance. The interface, the object, and the electronics all had to be designed at the same time: Figma and the Spotify API on one side, TinkerCad, Solidworks, and Arduino on the other.
How it works
A two-person loop
Find a song, send it, receive it, listen, react, rewind. Every exchange gets drawn as a light pattern and kept, so the speaker you listen through is also the thing holding the history.
Built on the library people already have
Orbit plugs into Spotify instead of building a catalog. Songs go straight out of a library someone already keeps, and the companion app shows what was sent, by whom, and what came back.
The work
- The interaction model
- Defined the two-person loop of share, react, accumulate, and made the call that what travels between people is a reaction rather than a message.
- Emotional language
- Five states: hype, surprising, chill, nostalgic, rewind. I animated them instead of drawing icons, tuning speed, colour, and movement together so you can tell them apart without being taught.
- Physical form
- Modelled the speaker in TinkerCad and Solidworks to sit flush against a wall, so it hangs like art instead of sitting on a shelf like a gadget.
- Electronics
- Arduino driving the LED array, with an enclosure material picked to diffuse the light so the states arrive as a glow instead of a hard pattern.
- Companion interface
- Designed the app against the Spotify layer so the music keeps its context and sharing stays a single action.
- System architecture
- Mapped how a reaction gets from one person's phone through the shared layer to light on both speakers at once.
The object
A speaker shaped like something you'd hang
The shell sits flush to the wall so Orbit hangs like art. We wanted a record of a relationship to be somewhere you'd see it every day.
Inside, an Arduino drives the LED array. The enclosure diffuses the light so a state arrives as a glow across the whole face and you never see the individual pixels.
Two speakers, one signal
A reaction leaves one person's phone, passes through the shared music layer, and lands on both speakers at the same time. The simultaneity is what makes it feel like it happened in one room.
Five states
Five states — hype, surprising, chill, nostalgic, rewind — each one a moving pattern instead of an icon. I tuned speed, colour temperature, and movement together so you can tell them apart across a room without learning a key.
They pile up. Five weeks in you have a small ring; five years in it's dense, and you can see which songs landed, when, and how hard.
The object turned out to do things a screen couldn't. The same exchange in a chat thread is gone as soon as you scroll past it. On a wall it just stays there.
