The Problem: Children with autism and/or fragile X syndrome have trouble expressing their emotions.

The Solution: The Emotion Owl provides an outlet for these children to show how they feel with different color lights and brightness depending on certain hand motions they make.

Detailed Solution: The children can show the owl to family and friends to express themselves instead of talking or lashing out. The Owl also has a heart beat which can help calm the children down.

 

 The Blooming Spine is a secondary 3D-printed "spine" that is attached to a persons back, to show the change in the wearer's center of balance and exaggerate the visibility of the spine's movement. As the wearer bends flowers will bloom in the same direction, and the weight at the top of the spine will weigh down creating an exaggerating bend and pulling all the weight to one side.
     The spine looks at movement and how the our own spines can change our center of balance. Our heads are a heavy object, meaning, if we bend our back in any direction the center of balance is changed. The blooming spine was built for a visual representation of how our spines change our center of balance. To do this, the spine joints are made out of 3D prints and connect to each other to create a long spine that can be mounted onto  the user's back. When they bend their spine , the spine will reveal a structure; for instance, bending in a certain direction causes plastic flowers to pop out from the spine. This allows the viewer to see a change and the wearer to feel a change. 

Breaking Bread was a NuVu Cambridge studio that created a performance art piece. Students worked with Lee Cusack, a U/X designer who has spastic quadriplegic Cerebal Palsy. Lee often feels isolated at meal times, and students used Lee's range of motion to determine the actions and communication pathways that would be used in a communal meal. This piece focused on universal roles in the act of eating together, and being fed by each other, to create a level of interaction that could equally be shared by all who participated.