First, I just came back from the UK with two iPads. They have been available in Europe for a long time, but not in Sweden. I couldn’t figure out a sensible reason, other than major lobbying from the swedish network providers. Anyway, we have two 16GB wifi-only units in the lab for your iPadding pleasure (see how happy the girl is on the product shot!).

Second, a HP Touchsmart 600 PC has been purchased for making multi-touch work more accessible and easy-going. The all-in-one solution computer provides multi-touch capabilities without the typical hardware setup: aligning camera, starting 3 applications to mashup everything, and fiddling with video filters. It’s not the best MT platform out there, but it was cheap.

Finally, we have received the Roland MDX-40A, a new small CNC machine/robot to take over the atom-world. The motivation for getting this type of machine is to experiment, play and push the boundaries of computer-controlled activities. How do you mix and blur the line between computation and the real material world: drilling 500 holes in a particular pattern, making PCBs without chemicals, engrave your portrait in a piece of wood, make a custom case for your next project, etc. It will take a few more weeks before it is fully operational, but the machine is finally here. Yeapi.

The 3-day event combined a mixture of keynote speakers, student research presentations, workshops, interactive sessions and social events.

We had the pleasure to have Heather Martin, Zachary Lieberman and Erik Stolterman as keynote speakers for the event. The videos of these presentations are now available online for you viewing pleasure.

Visit the Ingredients In Gradients website for the full proceedings and some pictures of the event.

Sponsors

2 PhD positions in Industrial Design

2 PhD positions in Industrial Design with an orientation towards mobile interaction design

The four new positions are inline with the Institute’s new strategic investment in basic research and post-graduate studies in design. With already two active PhD students and two recently accepted, these new developments show that the institution is committed to support and develop a nationally and internationally leading research environment.

More on UID website

See all the details at www.ingredientsingradients.com

However it still is fun to know that people are interested in our rants, raves and musings.

via YABA’s website.

We received news that 3rd place doesnt get us any money or medals.
There would be free glory in the form of free beers, but both Lena and I are a bit tied up with work so wont be attending.

On a more reflective note: I think the occassion begs a discussion on what we’re hoping to do more/less of with the blog.

I do believe that recent posts and discussions by Mikko, Camille, Roberto are exactly the kinds of voices we need to be through the blog.

Personally I’d hope to see more personal projects, ideas, reflections (rants of course!) and discussions materialize through the blog.

Would be nice to hear what others feel?

We have a great Interaction Workshop with tons of items, devices, gadgets, tools and such. Since we started the workshop 3 years ago, it’s been a struggle to keep track of the stuff, what we have in stock and what students/staff are borrowing. Last year, we started using paper lists, but it’s really far from a good solution: the lists become really messy and pens don’t write that well on vertical sheets!

I had this Booking System in mind for over 2 years now, and I’m quite happy to release it to the world today. It aims at solving a few needs we have in the Interaction Workshop:

• Have a master list of what we have and its value. For insurance and administration purposes.
• Keep track of what students/staff take out of the workshop. A booking system that allows people to see our list of equipment/devices and what is currently available for borrowing.
• Show what similar items are available if the selected one is not available.
• Provide information, support, links or other data for how to use a particular piece of equipment.
• Manage bookings (create/edit/return) fast and efficiently with RFID tags on items and users’ access card. Swipe-Swipe-Click-Click => You are done (or something like this)!

So the first public version is now online at http://www2.dh.umu.se/iworkshop. As you will notice, I didn’t spend much time on the visuals. My goal was to first have a functional system out and ready for use. This project has been under my TODO list for so long, I had to get it out in whatever form. In my opinion, it is missing a few key functions/things like images of the items, and a few other nifty things, but this will have to wait for a later version. I’m not in Umeå this Spring and integrating a webcam functionality from abroad is not trivial. Also, I want to see how people use it and adapt it to what people need or want.

The system is web-based using the CakePHP framework, and it uses AJAX and Javascript extensively. The dedicated station in the Interaction Workshop has a RFID reader hooked to it, and tag values are sent to the browser via a Processing + AppleScript + Javascript bridge.

At the moment, guests and students can not create and return bookings. This has to be done by staff (anyways most of the stuff is locked). We’ll see how it goes like this and adapt along the way.

Send all your feedback to me. And let me know how enjoyable or painful it is to use.

UID has nice workshops, teachers equipped with mustaches and turban, olympic-grade ping-pong table and coffee machines that spit out the worst brown liquid I know of, but one thing it is lacking is a proper web ninja. The web at UID has always been a somewhat low priority and it shows. I’ve been trying to do my share to reverse this planed cataclysm, but it’s clearly not enough. I alone cannot counter the school’s high latency on the issue.

Things might change soon as we now have an official position open for a web coordinator at UID. Yéééé! Read it all on the Current Vacancies page.

So if you are reading this post and thinking that this could be for you, email UID right away. Otherwise, please circulate the ad around so we can find the best candidate possible. I do hope that UID will evolve positively its web presence with the help of this new person. The slope is long and steep, I agree. But let us pray the HTML5 gods and the AJAX goddesses that it will happen.

I’m throwing in a nice picture to inspire us all!

The Call for Papers deadline has been extended, and we are now accepting submissions until January 31st. Please visit www.ingredientsingradients.com for details.

We are also pleased to announce that Zachary Lieberman (www.openFrameworks.cc) will be one of the keynote presenters along with Erik Stolterman (Indiana University), and one more presenter to be announced shortly.

Umeå Institute of Design is currently looking for four doctoral candidates. The PhD positions are within the fields of product design, transportation design and interaction design. The application deadline is January 29th 2010 and the positions are scheduled to start February 15th 2010.

PhD position in Industrial Design with a focus on innovative transportation design

2 PhD positions in Industrial Design with a focus on Interaction Design for Mobile Services

PhD position in Industrial Design with a focus on Human-centered Product Design

INGREDIENTS IN GRADIENTS
SIDeR 2010 conference • March 24–26 2010
Umeå Institute of Design • Umeå, Sweden
http://www.ingredientsingradients.com

– CALL FOR PAPERS –
Umeå Institute of Design and the Interaction Design Program are thrilled to host in March of 2010 the sixth edition of the Student Interaction Design and Research Conference (SIDeR). Our organizing committee invites design students to participate in this event to inspire and nourish evocative discussions on the subject of interaction design. We aim to receive thoughtfully written submissions and expect the presenters to demonstrate their inspiring visions with either tangible or visually rich (or both) evidence.

– ABOUT THIS YEAR’S TITLE — THE REASONING BEHIND THE WORDPLAY –
Ingredients in gradients: with this phrase we are aiming to communicate the intrinsic playfulness of the process behind the building and thinking involved when designing interactions. Further, our aim is to evoke the broadness and openness of the interaction design field.

We deliberately chose not to have any particular theme for the conference. We feel that the absence of thematic constraints—both for the students that desire submitting proposals and for the invited keynote speakers—will help generate the most passionate, thought-through and critical views on interactivity-related subjects.

– INSPIRATIONAL THEMES FOR ARTICLES –
* Interactivity for the real world – A spin-off of Papanek’s famous book. What is (or could be) “[Interaction] design for the real world”?
* You and me equal interactivity – Discuss the societal implications of ubiquitous gadgetery and embedding technology everywhere.
* One dose of code, two doses of craft, and a sprinkle of wit – Show us what you mean by a true and well thought-through systemic approach to design.
* Design for them or with them – Any luck with co-design? Share your recipes of recent success stories, or life-enhancing failures.
* Long lastin’ interactin’ – Give us your wide (and wild) intepretation on how one make sustainable and viable interactions come to life.
* Freebie – Push the boundaries of IxD and blow our brains out (or in).

– SUBMISSION –
The students who intend to present their work during the conference have to submit a video showcasing their interactive prototypes and systems, as well as an article that supports the video with solid and thoughtful (design) arguments. The goal for the article is for it to contribute both to design research, and to a greater extent, building and sharing knowledge amongst design students about interaction design.

The articles should be of a maximum length of 2000 words, using the Springer guidelines and be submitted by January 24, 2009. We are currently building the web infrastructure to receive all submissions. We should be able to accept submissions online by December 24, 2009.

– DATES –
SIDeR10 : March 24-25-26 2010
Submission opens : December 24 2009
Deadline for submission : January 24 2010
Notification of acceptance : February 21 2010
Deadline for conference registration : March 7 2010

– CONTACT –
For all questions and inqueries, please contact us at recipes (at) ingredientsingradients (dot) com
http://www.ingredientsingradients.com

High quality version: UID20_timelapse_640x480_105mb.mov [Quicktime, 105 MB]

The 2009 edition of the Fall Summit has come to an end yesterday. It was an intense three days of knowledge sharing and tinkering. All the talks were great—we hope to share them publicly within the next few weeks—as was the 2-day Fritzing workshop led by André Knörig, Reto Wettach and our own Camille Moussette, who we could never thank enough for making all of this happen.

Matt Cottam, who also helped orchestrating the Summit, has a great collection of photos from the conference day up on his Flickr page.

Yesterday also marked the last day of IxD2′s grueling but ever so satisfying Experience prototyping course. This infamous “techy” course that is of a 5-week duration started very low-tech with a full week of stop-motion video with Julien Vallée. The second week was dedicated to playing around—and generally refamiliarize ourselves—with Phidgets, Arduino and Processing, as well as studying literature on the topic of sketching in hardware with Camille. Over the third week we hacked iPhones and iPod Touches with the NADAmobile/Tellart workshop with Matt Cottam and Brian Hinch. The fourth week was a hodgepodge of playing around with multitouch tables for three days with Ru Zarin, and then being introduced to the DMX protocol and wireless technologies such as Xbee with Camille. On the fifth and final week, it was all about systems thinking and it’s translation into code (using mainly Processing) with Karsten Schmidt. Phew!

All in all, I think all of us in IxD2 can say that these five weeks were simply awesome. We learned a lot. Thanks to UID and—again—Camille, for making all of this happen.

Photos of the “code week with Karsten” and of the Fritzing workshop after the jump.

IxD Spring Summit 2009 [10 videos on Vimeo]

And more

Just a quick word to remind the interactiondesign.se readers that the Fall Summit 2009, hosted at Umeå Institute of Design, starts next Friday, November 6.

I believe that the Fritzing workshop that is going to take place over the week-end is fully booked, but that there is still room for the conference day.

See all the details and links at http://www.dh.umu.se/default.asp?P=2118&naar=2009