To all friends of the Umeå Institute of Design.

Welcome to the new generation!!

Amazingly enough, 20 years have passed since the first pioneer group of Swedish students and staff put together what has now grown to be the world renowned Umeå Institute of Design with students and staff from 29 different countries.

20 years, a whole generation Рsomething to celebrate Рand even more, a good excuse to gather, all of us Рhere in Ume̴ to rekindle old friendships, network and share stories from the past.

20 years, and now the new generation is lining up to take over. Professors Mike Stott and Pete Avondoglio are leaving or have left. Bengt Palmgren will leave the school at summer 2010. They have been replaced by new, young people, so in addition to the many new student faces, a new staff is growing rapidly.

20 years – thus friends, we welcome you to the first UmeÃ¥ anniversary-get-together to be held here, on December 3-4, 2009. We are putting together a relaxed and entertaining program, a few short speeches, some prizes, presentation of our new rector, publication of the book about UID’s first 20 years – but mostly good networking and fun, and of course a chance to meet the new staff and students as well.

We will start lunchtime on Thursday with looking back of the history of UID, getting reports from former students, party in the evening and continue with looking forward into UID´s future on Friday until 14.00. The full program will be published on the web after 16th of November.

Please register here before November 16th

So in the spirit of the new generation, we hope to see you all soon.

Leave a comment

A few months ago there was a post on this blog whose subject was making graffiti via eye-tracking (by a person who is afflicted by ALS). Anyway, the post informed us that the technologies used were open-source and low-cost and about to be publicly released.

So behold the Eyewriter. The site offers a great overview of the technologies used and and how all of this works. Very reminiscent of multitouch technologies (FTIR anyway).

Says the website:

It is a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.

All truly inspiring and generally awesome. Check it out.

The EyeWriter site: http://www.eyewriter.org/

Developed by openFrameworks, F.A.T. and the Graffiti Research Lab.

Read comments

There are some ideas of how can the mouse evolve. By the way, there´s a link in the video where you can buy the Apple Magic Mouse.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRHFvznyZQM]

Leave a comment

Following the legendary movie created by Charles and Ray Eames, this website explores the relative size of very small elements. Interesting as a visualization experiment and experience. I would like to see some pictures instead of digital drawings though, it would be more credible and powerful. LINK

visualizing relative scales

Leave a comment

• This is a video of Roomba Pac-Man in action. A few clarifications:
  • The red tape on the floor is simply so the user can visualize the map in the real world. The robots are unaware of the tape, and are rather constrained by a virtual boundary embedded in their programming.
  • The “dots” on the floor are pieces of paper the the Pac-Man Roomba must vacuum up to complete the map.
  • The ghosts actually autonomously search for Pac-Man, and when they get close enough to “sense” Pac-Man, chase him according to a set of probabalistic rules.
  • The human controller cannot force the Pac-Man to cross any boundaries, it will only allow inputs in valid directions.

For more in depth information check out the “hardware” and “software” sections.

Link

Leave a comment

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.
read more…

Leave a comment

via Gizmodo

A leaked presentation, so we make no claims to it.

A very slick video though.

Read comment

MultiTouch Workshop \'09 by Ru ZarinThis is a video demo of the Multitouch workshop that Ru Zarin conducted at the Umeå Institute of Design in Fall of 2009.

Read comment

Not sure if you guys know about this…

IxDA is holding a competition open to Interaction Students and recent grads (up to 1 year) for projects they believe embody excellent interaction design. Submissions are due by the end of this month. For more information visit the IxDA website.

Leave a comment

As Bruce Sterling points out, more like current interfaces.  Read all about it.

Read comment

Seems like CNN is now talking about data visualization. Cool!

Article here.

via @ben_fry
image from Pastiche

Leave a comment

Documentary about online gaming

This is a swedish documentary series that in this episode talk about the world of online gaming.It is all i english, except the absolut first part when they explai what it is about. It doesn’t go on for long.

Millions of people live a big part of their lives through these games and some, like 2nd life, also creates business opportunities and is on the verge of having their own legal system.

Alot of people condemn this type of lifestyle, claming it destroys our normal social behaviors and is in almost all cases bad for you. After watching this documentary, I feel that this might just become a natural part of our future everyay social life. Having a virtual avatar self, an your physical self. We are alreay going in that direction by using all sorts of social networks, facebook being the biggest. Are we just scared of the future? Is this the senario that our generation will have trouble accepting, just like our parents had a hard time excepting our obsessiveness with the mobile phone and the computer in general.  The possibilities are endless in the virtual world. Is it all that bad to explore them and buil on them to create enriched experiences and socializations?

Leave a comment

I don’t really like flow charts but this is an interesting use I think!

from jeannr

from loveallthis

Leave a comment

Mieux vaut tard que jamais! – Better late than never!

IxD Spring Summit 2009 [10 videos on Vimeo]

And more

Leave a comment

Two weeks ago I was in Seoul for the IASDR 2009 conference. This biannual event gathers design researchers, practitioners and students to build and advance knowledge in the field of Design. It was a fairly large conference, with about 700 participants from all over the world. As always some presentations were extremely boring, but out of the bunch some were very interesting too. I particularly liked the talk Six Real People by Dan Formosa from Smart Design.

The keynote presentations are available online. You have to wait some time for the video to load (not the best web integration) and the quality is so-so, but they are accessible for all to enjoy.

Donald A. Norman: Science and Design
Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders: Co-creation through generative design thinking
Kees (C.J.) Overbeeke: Eindhoven interaction design
Kazuo Kawasaki: Progressive Inclusive Design for Bottom of the Pyramid
Kyung-won Chung: “Caring for Citizens”: The New Value System of Seoul Design Excellence
(impressive what the city of Seoul is doing with/for/with design)

Read comment