Design Researcher — 2024 – 2025
Magneto haptic prototyping
Haptic feedback has come to mean one thing: microcontrollers. We spent eight months asking what else it could mean, and built it out of magnets, strings, and printed channels instead.
Role
Design Researcher & Product Designer
Tools
Rhino
Fusion 360
Grasshopper
Blender
3D Printing
Mechanical Design
40+ components
analogue haptics, no motors
20+
Rapid prototype iterations
Ethos — 01
A buzz is not the only way an object can answer you
An eccentric-rotating-mass motor gives every event the same body: unlocking a door and losing a game feel identical. Before microcontrollers made that the default, objects told you things through their own physics — resistance, detent, release. We took that as the starting constraint. No motors, no drivers, no firmware. Whatever feedback we produced had to come from the mechanism itself.
AxLab investigates a mechanism’s possibility space before asking what it is for. The use case is an output of the research, not its brief, which keeps the mechanism strange long enough to be interesting, and makes every prototype an answer to a question rather than a demo of a feature.
We did not find the limit of analogue haptics. We just questioned what we currently know what to ask of it.
Photos
Process — 02
Bottom-up, on purpose
01
Start from the mechanism
No motors, no drivers, no firmware. Whatever feedback we produced had to come from the mechanism itself. We used magnets, strings, and printed channels to create vibration based haptic feedback. We started with what we know about haptics beyond microcontrollers, and vibration has been used and explored in human tools and devices for about as long as we've known of it; from instruments to archer's bows. From this inquiry, we developed our prototype which consisted of a 3D filament string-suspended magnet positioned near a channel carrying a trigger magnet. This yields a system by which tension is pulled as the magnets attract, and is released as the trigger magnet leaves the suspension field.
02
Sweep the variables
String length, magnet size and channel geometry were the variables at play. Each one changed the character of the vibration, the functionality of the prototype, whether the trigger magnet could be released on its own or if it required force, and what the whole interaction could be and what it would mean. The mechanism had to stay legible whether it was shaken, lifted, rotated or intercepted directly along a set path.
01
Track the motion, find the bottleneck
Custom motion-tracking software cut prototype cycles by 30% and exposed the real constraint. Reading relativedisplacement in 3D is hard, so the mechanism struggles to know what the user meant. Intent-sensing, not feedback, was the limit. We thought about motions and interactions like shaking, pulling, throwing; but motion paths, no matter how complex, are extremely difficult to tune without relative information about stating points, force, and angles.
What I made — 03
Built by hand, end to end
+
CAD modeling
Grasshopper simulation
Rapid prototyping
User testing
Motion tracking software
+
CAD modeling
Stack
Rhino · Fusion 360 · Grasshopper · 3D Printing
Findings — 04
What the work returned
8
months of analogue-only feedback
0
firmware in the feedback loop
Labs
possibility space before the brief
Harriet Fisher
Made with love.