Face Mask
Product Design, Interface Design
A handlebar-mounted device with a folding clear shield, designed against a 2020 brief for a speculative human-health interface. The working title is a misnomer the project's own title page already admitted to: nothing about it goes near a face.
- Drawing title
- Sheet 04-04
- Organisation
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- Year
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Background
INDN 204, Material Interface. The brief asked for a speculative device addressing a future human problem, judged entirely on how a user interfaces with it rather than on how the device would actually work, and named the COVID pandemic directly as a source of problems worth designing for.
What I built
A handlebar-mounted grip with a folding clear shield that deploys above the rider on three ribbed arms. The housing is soft-touch rubber and textured aluminium, with a rotary dial, an unlock icon and a green status light set into the grip itself, so every control sits where a hand already is and none of it needs to be looked at while riding.
The brief marked on the interface rather than the internals, and the object takes that literally: what it argues is that protection should deploy from the thing you are already holding, rather than being one more item to remember, put on and take off.
The problem
The name. "Face Mask" is a working title the workbook's own cover page immediately undercuts: "Face Mask, without the face mask." Nothing about the device sits anywhere near a face.
Outcome
The name stays, because renaming it now would quietly tidy away the most honest thing about the project: a 2020 health brief pulled every student toward the mask, and this one ended up somewhere else entirely while still carrying the mask's name on the folder. Keeping both, and saying so, is a truer record than a tidy retitle.
