http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVUTEVZCqsg
A nice little video from Philips: “Our homes have changed radically over the past century”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxxRAHVtafI
Nice little video from Google on speech recognition and voice interaction with computing devices.
“Language. Easy for humans to understand (most of the time), but not so easy for computers. This is a short film about speech recognition, language understanding, neural nets, and using our voices to communicate with the technology around us.”
or rather, What do interaction designers do?
At the end of the Experience Prototyping course at UID, the students raised that question. It is a rather fundamental one, and impossible to answer in one single way and it will be different for anyone that considers themself to be working in this field.
Very recently, one way of thinking about such questions was eloquently sketched by Joep Frens in his Nierenberg Lecture at the design department of Carnegy Melon University in Pitsburg on October 1st, 2014.
(Joep came to teach one week of Experience Prototyping at UID in 2011)
Important Dates
October 22, 2014, 11:59 pm PST: Entry submission deadline
November 22, 2014: Notification of Acceptance
December 5, 2014, 11:59 pm PST: Student Design Challenge team commitment and registration
The Challenge
The Internet of Things is curiously lacking in knobs and switches. Instead, it’s controlled by a collection of glass rectangles. Our hands do more than just touch and swipe, however. We have fingers that can feel, pinch, grip, turn, and point. They are attached to our arms, which act as levers to amplify the force we can exert with our hands. Our hands and arms are covered with nerve endings that give us intelligence about the world we live in that our eyes and ears can’t fully deliver. History is littered with tools we’ve designed to take full advantage of our hands. Even into the early electronic era, we have designed wonderfully informative tangible tools. Great tangible controls are not just input devices. They act as physical indicators of the state of a system that we read through our hands. The click of a switch gives us haptic feedback that the device has heard our commands. The arrangement of a row of sliders reads like a graph to our fingers. Good tangible interfaces are also well-coupled with the things they control, providing an immediate feedback loop. The feedback from a steering mechanism makes your body a part of the vehicle’s movement, encouraging you to rely on more than just your eyes and ears.
Everyday appliances have grown some wonderful new features thanks to digital technologies. Home lighting is no longer just white light, nor need it be strictly turned on and off with a single switch. Lighting designers (and consumers) can now play with color, intensity, and time in their lamps. Yet tablet device interfaces lack the convenience and immediacy of the switch, particularly when you’re fumbling in the dark. How can you deliver on the promise of these new features, yet retain the convenience and tangible intelligence of the switch? This year’s design challenge is to imagine a digital present that takes full advantage of the capabilities of your hands and arms and delivers not only control, but also feedback about the system it controls. What the everyday tangible controls of our daily life for the 21st century. What’s the best tangible light switch for the Philips Hue? What’s the track selector on a Spotify jukebox? What controls give a media editor the ability to think through his work with his body, shifting pieces, clipping and extending with his hands and arms? Design so that your user can take full advantage of the capabilities of her hands, both operating and learning from touch, feel, and position. Use no sound, and no more than 64 pixels* in your final design. Imagine devices that that allow your user to keep her eyes and ears on the task, not on the controls.
More info at http://www.tei-conf.org/15/student-design-competition
The amazing folks at Microsoft Research Cambridge have come up with a few mechanical contraptions that elegantly represent data in the tangible and physical world. Here is the description of the project, from the web page:
The physical charts are an attempt to make data and data visualisations legible to ordinary people in their daily lives. In response to the increasing sophistication of data visualisations and the seemingly unquestioning quest for novelty, the charts make playful use of long established and highly familiar representations like pie charts and bar graphs. Rather than estrange viewers, the objective is to enable them to, at a glance, engage with and comprehend data.
The physical and dynamic qualities of the charts are intended to draw people in to viewing data, differentiating them from screen-based visualisations that are beginning to lose their salience in our information-rich environments. The beauty of the charts is in how simple they are to read and how the physical mechanics produce strikingly visual (and tactile) representations of data.
Check the videos at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/physicalcharts
The Physical Charts were designed and built by David Sweeney – with software development from Tim Regan and Alex Butler.
Sketching of any form (on paper, in hardware, in video) enables you to let your ideas talk back to you.
This is a resource for developing your sketching skills on paper (not only for shape and mechanical development, also for storytelling and interaction design).
Martijn van de Wiel’s Designsketching on facebook has even more than his Vimeo channel
(full disclosure: Martijn is a long time friend…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGoxMmKAG_I
SmartMat guides your practice and dynamically detects which pose you are doing, giving you responsive feedback on your Yoga practice.
Though the Perfect Pose Technology, SmartMat offers real time adjustments in alignment and balance, helping you refine your practice while it learns more about “You” to offer a deeper level of personalized instruction for both the new and experienced Yogi.
“Many design tools today are static. Interaction and animation remains trapped in the mind of the designer. There is no easy way to iterate on these ideas, or to communicate them to others.
Form is an attempt to solve this problem. The tool lets you build custom prototypes directly on the device. Form prototypes are native. They have access to the device’s camera and other sensors. Prototypes built with Form are as powerful as their coded counterparts.”
SAM is an Internet of Things development kit that feels and shapes our world. With no coding and no wires, your ideas come to life in minutes!
Photo. Akiko Nabeshima
Unfortunately this article does not have a fancy little video summary to post. However it is a nice read and a brief summary of some of the complexities of touch in designing robots and robotic user interfaces. Perhaps it sparks some thoughts or interface experiments in the new school year.
Why not add some technology to your meditation? Found on the Arduino Blog.
