Piggy bank

October 2009

This project was done in two days and a half as part of the Experience prototyping course we had at the Umeå Institute of Design. During five weeks we used different tools and techniques to prototype different sorts of interactive experiences.

In the third week we decided to work on a modern version of a piggy bank. The piggy bank is alive and it randomly gets sad because it needs to be fed with money. The idea is that the device acts more like a pet, so you have to take care of it, feed it with money using your credit card whenever it gets hungry and it will credit small amounts of money that would be put to a savings account.

The prototype is a proof of concept built with an Arduino that controls when to call for attention and detects if the credit card has been placed in the slot.