Alfons

(Carola Meier)

The second group is called Alfons. It’s a tool, which helps you in difficult situations, like giving a speech, writing a test or other situations, in which you feel uncomfortable and wish to have a loved person next to you, holding your hand. In most of this situations having someone with you isn’t possible, but Alfons won’t let you alone. It’s a little gadget which is held by you and your loved person. It transfers the pressure of the hand to the other person. The loved person is still not there, but you can feel its love and its support. It’s not just in one direction. The stressed person can also push his Alfons and the other person feels it.

Alfons is based on Miriam’s, a course participant, experience. When she had a math or physics test at school, her father learned with her for it and for the test she got a necklet, called Alfons, which look like a cat with a very long neck. Alfons knows a lot about math and physics, like Miriam’s father and was able to help. In the test she hold Alfons and felt the help and support of Alfons and her father. Our group wanted to build a new Alfons with the ability to transport the feeling of holding hands.

Designing and building of Alfons was an iterative process. At first we started to look for a good material, which can be squeezed and gives a good feeling while doing that. We also had to decide how we want to give feedback for pressure. At first we thought we give vibration, but a normal hand doesn’t vibrate. Then we thought about giving pressure to the middle of the hand but finally we decided to push the top and bottom of the hand like a normal handshake.

Position Alfons squeezes the hand

Iterative process of designing Alfons

The next step was to build a software and coordinate the hardware. When searching for hardware I found a swim board, which was the perfect material to build Alfons with. When the software controlled the hardware we had design a cover for Alfons. We thought a lot about it. In the end we hand to different cover. One for adults, one for kids.

The last step was to film the video prototype and to present our product.

Final version of Alfons