The brief for this project was to create an interactive hat from the past. We created "The Resolution Reaching Hat", a hat which would have been used to aid decision making within a business.

"The Resolution Reaching Hat is a decision-making aid, invented in 1905 by Neville Watson, creator of automata and Quentin Goodall, a milliner. It fooled the public for nine years.

The hat was created when the owner of a cotton mill asked for a device to help make decisions regarding his business. Goodall and Watson failed to produce an automaton capable of making calculated decisions. Instead, they produced an elaborate and convincing mechanical display of clockwork that generated an entirely random answer.

The hat's secret lay dormant until 1912 when the partners fell out and Goodall exposed the lie in anger."

This is our dicumentary video, one of the project requirements.



The purpose of this project was to explore the early days of interaction design. Considering our design language and how to give our design an authentic feel was an important part of the challenge. This project took my researching skills and design consideration skills to a new level.

This was also one of the first design projects where we had to craft the object entirely by ourselves. This lead us to the new and strange land of the university workshop and meant a lot of late nights trying to make our design a reality.

I worked on this project with Neil Dawson and the exhibition website is online here.