Higher Creative Thinking - Project Nanuo
For my first Higher Creative Thinking project we were tasked with identifying a real world problem and designing a creative solution to communicate it. I settled on microplastics after a lot of online research. The hidden scale of the issue, the fact most people still don't fully understand what they're doing to our bodies felt like exactly the kind of thing that deserves more attention.
My solution was Nanuo a retro plastic cleanup encouragement machine made by a fictional company called Tiny Fragments™. The idea is a small device that sits in city centres, outside shops or at recycling points and celebrates any progress being made locally to reduce microplastic pollution. It has an emotive pixel face and a scrolling message display almost like a Tamagotchi mixed with a train station departures board.
This project pushed me into a lot of areas I hadn't combined before and taken to completion: hardware prototyping, 3D printing, software, branding and poster design all at once. It was genuinely one of my favourite things I've made. I got to solder design a real component case in Inventor, build a Python driver and then somehow bring it all together into something that feels like an actual product.
Nanuo runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W connected to a 2.8 inch LCD display all housed in a custom case I designed in Autodesk Inventor and printed on my Bambu Labs A1 Mini. I went through three prints to get the dimensions right. I had to physically measure the parts when they arrived and correct the model twice. The case uses brass heat set inserts and M2.5 bolts to hold everything together. Total build cost came to about £28.76 which I was surprised by as I expected it to be more.
The Python driver displays an animated pixel face that reacts to different: message types, community milestones, cleanup events, goals completed. Nanuo even sleeps between 10pm and 7am. I built the initial structure with help from Claude then extended it with custom faces a bolder font for readability on the small screen and a sleep mode. For the brand I designed the Tiny Fragments™ logo across multiple iterations in Affinity settling on a fragmented geometric mark. I also made two posters and a VHS-recorded presentation video.
I filmed myself presenting my project then ran the footage through my VCR onto a real VHS tape and captured it back. I wanted it to feel more interesting than a regular talking-head video and it ended up being one of my favourite parts of the whole project.