graphic design exhibition

That's how we set up the exhibition. The triangular boxes represent one student each. There is the portrait photography on one side, the poster on the second and the text on the third - done by three different students.
The animations about each student are projected on the wall.

We built an interactive terminal to choose the animation you want to look at (see video)
As long as no animation is played, the screensaver animation i did is running, giving the explanation on who did which media on whom...(see video) There is an RFID tag in each wooden thingy, read out by a RFID reader mounted below the table.

it moves_2

Another small animation i made to explain our tasks during the last five weeks...It runs as a part of the exhibition at UID, so it is maybe not 100% self-explanatory...core-information: who did what on whom - got it? 

it moves

Last week we finished with our 5 week graphic-design / visualization course...The last task was to do an animation using only type. It should use parts of the text one of our classmates wrote about another classmate some weeks before + music the person it is about likes.

See my result above!

shape type

Great game on type to waste time and test the grade of your typefaces-geekyness.

shape type

graphic design_2

 

Everyone needed to take another one's portrait to translate it into a poster. Some type elements should be taken from the portrait we wrote on each others some weeks before.

graphic design

We finished with a great class on graphic with the swiss designer Christian Altmann today. See his work here.

The task was to design a cd cover for "Johann Sebastian Bach's Brandenburgische Konzerte". These are the results.

portraits

Finished our photography week. Did not expect such a high level as none of us is a professional.
Next step will be to translate the photos to a poster related to that person

Gestural interfaces in operating rooms

When I did my diploma thesis on Augmented Reality in interventional medicine, I did some research at the TU Munich. Those guys still do really interesting stuff, like this concept about gestural control of content in an OR scenario.

paper emotions

Task: Communicate one out of nine different given emotions with cut-out pieces of black paper.

This one is fear.

processing (introduction = 1); {

Yesterday intro class on processing. I never imagined programming could be fun. Am I turning geekier every day?

Hope I can show some spectacular results soon...Currently its more like a grey dot moved by the mouse. Ah, and the background changes due to the position.

Wednesday talks. Multitasking.

Wednesday talk at UID: "i think sketch therefore i am" It was about how sketching can improve the creative process, by supporting the right half of your brain. Interesting, no revolutionary thoughts though.

Actually I was interested in the guy next to me - using two iPhones simultaneously. I couldn't resist asking him why: He is splitting up the tasks he performs on them - one, with a phone contract for calling (the older one) and the newer 4G for internet and other stuff. Hm.

He also did some photos with one of them while text-messaging with the other. I actually worked on multi-tasking issues in consumer electronics, but this did not reveal to me.

some impressions

fall turns to an end in Umeå. It gets colder and darker every day...I heard, the river will be completely frozen during wintertime. There were people having a picnic on it once. Cozy!

portraits

Crash-course on portrait photography this week. One of my classmates shared a link to a documentation on Annie Leibovitz - probably one of the most famous photographers of our days...quite inspiring!

--> see the video here.

so cliché :)

Legobrick ideation! Love it :) I don't want to tell too much - it's on a exhibition we will have in about 4 weeks...

reflect!

After studying 5 weeks at UID, we did a reflection on it ( In the IxD programme we reflect A LOT! ) What to keep, what to tweak...Actually the tweaks predominated :) Seems we are a pretty critical class! Good thing, though. 

how to crash a euro-palette with a forklift

There was a presentation of a one week workshop about car-security at UID today. One of the groups built a full-scale model of a car cockpit - with a camera projecting content to the field of view. Impressive!

The whole workshop was a collaboration of all the 2nd year master students at UID. That meant, that transportation designers, product designers and interaction designers grouped and worked on different concepts for 5 days.

After working on a few car related projects in the past, some of the stuff was not totally new and mind-blowing, but there were some really interesting approaches, that will be discovered in following projects at UID.

I passed by the project room from time to time, and it seemed to be great fun...Some guys attached a car seat on a manual forklift and crashed it against a europallete to see what happens...They used a human dummy (he was actually missing at the presentation :) )

Arduino!

Started with Arduino today. Finally! Can't wait to do fancy interactive installations :) We will continue with programming in Processing as well - so soon it will be more than a LED controlled by a potentiometer...I think I will post some updates on my nerdskills from time to time.

It would be sooo great to have a graphical developer environment for Arduino...I guess it would make it a lot easier to start up (but it would take away the geek-factor)

Memories on celluloid

Right before we left to Umeå, a friend of Jassi and mine gave us a disposable camera to take some memory pictures. Even if we both own digital cameras and smartphones we used it and took it with us. Today we take it to a shop to develop the pictures.

I can not even remember the last time I was so curious and excited to see pictures! As it is some four weeks ago when we took the last picture, I can not remember all the motifs and people who are on them.

I have to say, this is a beautiful, and sometimes even thrilling experience, that got lost over the years due to technological progress. I am wondering if there is a way to do something on this?

Worked on machines. Did stuff.

 Finished with the workshop introduction. Refreshed my skills on real machines. It was great fun to create something tangible with your own hands :)

Even if not all the stuff is doing something or is functional. The orange thingy is a 'Tomte', which means Santa Claus in swedish. It is made from a round PVC profile  Every UID student has to do it in order to get the license to turning and milling machines.

I had nice talk about it with some of my classmates - this thing almost could serve as some sort of identifier for all UID students, as it was done for years by every single student at the school. Every single Tomte is similar, but still different in the details, as it is handcrafted and not perfect.

After doing the Tomte, we all had to do a metal clamp, which was slightly more challenging because of the material. Did not work with metal for years!

We also had to do something out of wood, to get the license on the planning machins, band saw, table saw etc...I don't have a picture of the result yet, as I am still searching for a prominent position :)

map of creative process

Interesting infographic on creative process by Melike Turgut.
Would be nice to have it interactively connected with some content developing.

I am actually wondering if it could be a program that traces the steps in your creative process and visualizes it. Some sort of interactive log.

WLAN in every bus in Umeå

In Umeå every bus now has a free Hotspot. Nice, especially if you still have a German contract :)

workshop introduction

For the next two weeks the first year IxD students get an introduction to the wood and metal workshop. Didn't work on 'real' machines for a while - good to get a brush-up on that!

On the left you see DOLF, our booking system for used materials. At UID you can use every material, even for private purposes and pay in the end of the term everything you booked on your DOLF account.












Simply a great thing - even if some people at UID complain about some details. Okay, it could have a nicer interface :)

the cube

 Jassi and I finally moved to our final flat. All our stuff fitted in this box for the last 4 weeks.

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.

Arrived.

 Arrived.  It looks like we expected it to do :) Actually even more cliché, but in the authentic welcoming way. This is Bullerbü!















Jassi bought a bike. This is definitely a bikers town, never saw so many cyclists (but in Münster) (okay, Holland as well...) And what is great about it: Cars actually care about you! They even stop if you want to cross a street, and stay behind you until you turned - greetings to Munich at this point ;)