A crocodile in New York City

The last assignment for the week: Everyone of us got a picture and a Lego Minifigure as a 'user' ( we were allowed to keep it, YAY! ).  We had to think on how our 'user' could benefit from a networked city and come up with some ideas on that. I had a crocodile in New York City.

soldering

Tinkering, level one: getting the license to solder in the IxD workshop - finally it starts to be serious :) UID has a great stock of equipment: different Arduinos, Xbox kinect, Wii - almost everything you need for prototyping. I am really looking forward to turn geeky in the next two years.

nursing home grandparent - at a restaurant - proximity

After the mapping exercise we did a fun brainstorm on service design: Divided in groups of 2-3 students, we received a set of cards in three colors. The task was to group one of every color, while pink was a user, orange was a location and green was a particular kind of sensor. We spend brainstorming for a couple of minutes to come up with a service idea for every group of cards. Then we decided for one favorite idea to present it in the form of a stage play...

Our words were: 'recent immigrant' + 'at the bank' + 'GPS sensor' ... Matt did a movie of every groups play - i hope they will NEVER come to light...

It was a very interesting way to come up with tons of ideas in a very short time - and it was great fun :)

mapping a social network

Next morning, very nice results from all my classmates - all with totally different materials, approaches, solutions...Just some words on my work: I chose to use an old keyboard as material, as it stands for me as the main way of interacting in a social network. We had to map different characteristics in our model, so i raised the keys one millimeter per friend i have beginning with a particular letter ( M won! ) The return key is raised by the number of status messages i posted since I started using facebook (green stands for 2009, yellow for 2010, pink for 2011)

Afterwards i have to say, i should have chosen different materials, as I was always afraid of trying out things ( i only had one keyboard to use ) I think a better approach is, just use stuff like toothpicks and do a lot of trials ( and errors! )  see the results of all of my classmates here.  

Introduction to IxD - with Matt Cottam

The new week is about a workshop with Matt Cottam from Tellart, Amsterdam ( maybe somebody knows their bell-project...have a look also on the other projects - really awesome work ) We got an appointment to map our social network ( facebook or other ) in a lo-fi model...let's see what comes up.

He shared a lot of very nice things I also have to share at some point...

my desk at UID

That's my desk at UID. Still looks quite clean...let's see what happens here in the next weeks and months :)

Tinkering as PhD thesis. Great.

In our weekly literature circle ( great thing btw - I finally get to read a lot more ) the UID PhD researcher Camille Moussette did show some of his work on haptical sketching. Amazing stuff. He is working on thoughts how tactile feedback can be communicated. or so :) See his homepage and his blog for more tinkering.

Design talk by Henrik Otto (Electrolux)

At UID, every wednesday afternoon there is a talk by some design relevant guy. This time it was Henrik Otto, senior vice president of global design at Electrolux. I love the title, sound so important. I think this guy IS important - at least at Electrolux ;) It was fun to listen to, even if i did not agree to all of his statements...At some point he stated, that a product with a touchscreen lacks user experience, as it does not address tactile senses...A touchscreen can feel slippery or sticky, greasy or even moist, looks ugly after usage and so on. I TOTALLY agree that the haptic quality of today's touchscreens is far away from appealing, but user experience is way more than just the activation of tactile sense. YES, i had to say that, as I do IxD now :) Still, i love the flying oldtimer car.

Just a thought on interviewing technique

In our discussions during the week we talked a lot about how our interviews went. There are so many things you can do wrong.

An interesting idea i need to try at some point would be to do an interview in a group of three - the questions go to two people who answer to it. This could lead to a lot more answers, as interviewees often act shy and reserved being in an interviewing situation. In addition, one of the interviewees could be a member of the team, acting as a motor for the conversation.

Interviewing and vibrating toys

We did some talks this week, to learn the technique of open-ended interviews. It was harder than expected. Even if i did a lot of interviewing in the projects I was involved - this time it was different. Maybe it was because there was no clear 'goal' like you have in a practical research? But exactly that led to very interesting results after three sessions. Next week we will continue with writing a portrait of the interviewed person.

My interviewee was Daniel. If you want to see what this super nice box is about, see his homepage.

The ping pong challenge with Ben Hopson

                         

To warm up and get started we had a nice workshop led by Ben Hopson ( check out his website! )

The aim was to get a ping pong ball from one table (height 75cm) to another tabler (75cm) - but it needed to go under a wire wich was in between the two tables in the height of 50cm.

See the results here:

Masterplan

We had the first meeting with our program coordinator, Niklas...

That's the plan: 4 weeks of skills and methods, followed by 4 weeks of graphic design, followed by a ccoperational project with the police: police com central - sounds promising!

ClipArts are not dead!

We had a introduction to the library up at  the main campus ( the designers, architects and fine artists are situated at the arts campus, closer to the city center down by the river ). Please pay special attention to the great MS PowerPoint clipart graphics.

Sightseeing

Today we had a trip around the city organized by UID. Some nice spots around here, even if we did not really see the surrounding area.