nikki takes an opposite position to the contemporary trends of life logging, quantified self and wearable computing. The goal of which is to increasingly capture all aspects of our private and social lives, to digitalize and to archive them: our biographies are being written automatically.
Contrary to this development nikki sets focus on our very own abilities to be aware and to remember. nikki offers its user a daily ritual that – if conducted regularly – lets him/her go through the day with increasing mindfulness.
Inspired by the very short japanese haiku poems the compact box challenges its user to summarize his/her day in just a few spoken words. These “daily essences” are spoken into the device in the evening. nikki immediately thereafter prints them on a paper band that is coming out of its front side.
To feed nikki with a daily essence the push-to-talk button on top of the device has to be pushed. As long as the button is being pushed nikki is listening. As soon as it is released the inputted message is being printed out.
nikki basically consists of a Raspberry Pi microcomputer and a small thermal printer. The software binding everything together was developed in Python. The google-speech-API takes care of converting speech recordings into printable text.
