In this course, led by Frank Heidmann, the goal was to pick a usability problem and design a better solution than those provided by existing products and services.

For my project I chose to create a new a approach for using the smartphone as universal remote to combat to fatigue of countless remotes to control electronic devices in small to middle sized homes and apartments.

I identified two main factors that my solution should combat:
With the many remotes, necessary to control the devices in our home, we usually just need a fraction of the available buttons and modes for everyday use. Universal remotes are hard to train and tend to suffer from the same problem.

On the other hand, manufacturers started to offer "smart" products to be controlled from the smartphone, but those solutions were mostly proprietary thus incompatible with other manufacturers and way more expensive than conventional counterparts.

My solution is a little device called Rubimote. It's intended to be mounted over the couch in the living room, and can read and repeat radio and infrared commands from a variety of angles.

On an App that accompanied the device on the smartphone, users could define commands, chain them into routines and finally trigger them on the device via bluetooth.