Jack Hooper

MYtempo (group project)

MYtempo is a wearable device that improves your capacity to manage the pressures of time and stress in your daily life. It enables you to become more alert or to relax, without drugs such as caffeine or alcohol, or time-consuming methods such as meditation.

It does this through the application of a phenomenon called heart rate entrainment, by which our internal biological rhythms, in this case heart rate, can synch up with an external beat. From this we created and tested a new way of achieving this effect using a tactile stimulus that encourages the user’s pulse to respond, raising or lowering their heart rate and so stimulating or relaxing them.

The effect is similar to that of listening to upbeat music to wake up or chilled out music to relax but without the associated distraction, so a user can get more control over how they feel and perform.

UGO

UGO is part infrastructure, part leisure activity, part architectural intervention celebrating the dramatic landscape of the built environment and challenging the place of the human within it.

Taking inspiration from urban explorers and viewing the built environment as simply another landscape to discover, UGO proposes a series of wire-ways strung up, over and between the buildings. Urban Gliders can slide along these to previously unmanageable locations and get a new perspective on the city.

They do this using equipment that harnesses them to the wires and enables them to glide along in a method akin to cross-country skiing so that they can climb up, slide down and move fluidly around the full 3D space of their environment.

Starting as a series of Glide Resorts in selected, dramatic locations it can be seen that these would grow and interconnect, as has happened with ski resorts, to create a citywide network. From here, a new infrastructure could grow that opens up much more space for people to use, right on their doorsteps.

UGO puts the human first within the built environment and frees them to explore further, opening up new perspectives and experiences in the urban great outdoors.