The concept

4 Weeks to go, here is the final concept of my thesis project...I would love to write more about it - but it's just far to little time left. There will be a complete report published in summer, and my portfolio homepage will be updated as well.

So, here is the so-called 5 weeks before presentation:

MA thesis work

I haven't really posted things about my degree work here on the blog, as I mostly use SlideShare to share my presentations...So far we had three of them:

The kick-off, end of January:



A research presentation, end of February:

The mid-review, end of March:

Colorforecast

This is a pretty nice project I stumbled upon doing research on monitoring. It uses webcams and some code to evaluate colors people wear in different "fashion"- cities. Not that I am to much into fashion, but I think it is a nice example on how playful interactive projects can have a value for people who may not even know what that is :)

Colorforecast

a workshop on workshops

This morning we had a workshop on how to conduct a workshop. It ended up being more like an open lecture/discussion with input from all participants. Main outcome: There is no other way learning how to do a good workshop than doing a workshop. One nice book-resource many people may not know (at least i didn't ;)

"The Idea Agent" by  Jonas Michanek and Andréas Breiler...There is also a homepage about it here

revival!

As it's been quite a while since the last post, I will try to wrap up what happened since. Below I will put in content in chronological order. I did some more posts, so make sure to browse back!

I just started with my Master-Thesis. In collaboration with the German Nature Conservation Union (NABU) I am working on crowd-sourcing data to track and survey activities and development of nature protection areas. As i can't promise how often I will update this blog until I am done - my slideshare account is the best way to follow, as I am uploading all my presentations there.

(This is what I see while writing these lines)

itaú: transformative transactions

The last project before i started with my master thesis was an individual project in cooperation with the biggest south-american bank, Itaú. The brief asked us to think about the future of banking. We could choose our own focus almost unrestrictedly. That led to a very diverse range of great results in our class. 

I decided to work on the aspect of shared living expenses. It was a choice based on personal experiences, but I received feedback from countless people that supported my ideas.

Here is the result in form of an animation and the abstract.



"Companion is a banking service aligned with the special needs of shared living communities.
A lot of people live in shared flats as it offers numerous benefits. Even though the motivation to move into a shared flat is as different as the people who live in them, it is apparent that sharing goods supports a good atmosphere and vice versa. Companion supports this reciprocity by providing a flexible solution every shared living community can adapt to their needs.

The service consists of a bank-account, a web- and a mobile application and physical tokens, the companions themselves. The bank account can be used to collect monthly contributions to do regular payments like rent, electricity and internet and to save money for other shared expenses.
Each tenant owns one companion, that is recognizable by a color
chosen before. The companions visualize the shared flats financial situation in a simplified way: If there are debts amongst the flatmates, if one tenant is very successful in saving money for the community or if the shared accounts balance is growing or getting smaller.

As the companions are placed in the shared space of a flat, they become a part of everyday life, supporting the sharing and saving behavior by using the rules the tenants agreed upon."

I got a lot of insights from a workshop i conducted at UID. 12 people from the Interaction-, Advanced Product- and Transportation Design program shared their ideas and experiences they had on my project.

One personal goal I set for myself was building an experiential prototype that is as close as possible to the final products physical appearance. Using an Arduino Mini Pro, the TexasInstruments TLC5940 LED driver and an "optimized" breadboard layout made it possible to achieve that goal.

The prototype was part of an exhibition at school. The next step would have been fitting the technical components into the product design i did for the project.