Beatballs

Concept

The idea generating process consisted of several iterations where the whole class was separated into 10 groups to ideate and then present their ideas to the rest of the teams. Exhaustive debates of the potential ideas were held, and they were evaluated using two main values related to the task — virality and originality.

From almost 20 good ideas we chose one relationship — food and music. This relationship has endured the passage of time across many cultures. They are historical complements and partners, from the kitchen to the dining room. Through a combination of programming, design, and a legal amount of madness, we developed code that converts music into taste. For the first time in history anyone could find out how ”Gangnam Style”, ”Bohemian Rhapsody” and ”Beat It” taste.

The Machine

I was working in the group which was responsible for creating a freak machine out of junk materials and some leftovers. It was designed from scratch starting with sketches and involved creating engineering components to make every part of the machine move as we wanted.

At the core of the Beatballs there is software that analyses sounds with the help of The Echo Nest algorithms and translates the results into different flavours. It basically makes meatball recipes out of music. Then the machine, powered by two Arduinos, mixed certain amounts of ingredients and cooked a meatball out of them. Voilà a tasty meatball!

Team Dynamics

It was really hard to work in such a big group. At the beginning even the smallest and trivial discussions switched into irrelevant and energy-draining conversations. We spent almost half of the week looking for the right aproach and tools to use in order to come to a consensus.

At some point we decided to split up into several subgroups, each of which worked on a particular part of the project. There were representatives from each department who had their own meetings where they shared statuses and information between subgroups.

As a wrap up each group created an energy diagram of the project and shared their reflections on the process with each other.