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Introduction to Human Centered Design for amazing RLabs in Cape Town
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Where would we live today if the world map was different?
Behavioural Composites with Roland Snooks
- Paths of human migration generated over an alternative Earth map surface
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NordiCHI ’12 highlights
Few weeks ago the wind of HCD was fierce around ITU Copenhagen as the Nordic forum for human-computer interaction research, NordiCHI ’12 was taking place. This year NordiCHI gathered a passionate design crowd with high talents and ambitions, professionals eager to discuss, to learn and to share. There were many interesting presentations often performed in parallel sessions and it’s certainly hard to cover them all. In this post I’ll attempt to highlight my personal favorits- several papers that can be clustered under four different themes:
1. Synesthesia in interfaces
2. Hybrid interfaces in urban spaces
3. Crowdsourcing
4. Impersonality in design process
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Designing for Audience engagement
Here are my slides from my presentation at the NordiCHI 2012 WP:
If that caught your interest, you can get the full paper here.
Design journey in Shanghai-style
Shanghai, the most highly-populated city of the world, just hosted Radical Design Week where Finnish design thinking was invoked to re-think China.
Our Design Project in Shanghai
As part of the Radical Design week, we, 15 children of Aalto were drafted to attempt to do rapid user-driven innovation in Shanghai. Our task was to understand the context, the user and to create a service concept for a german car company– all of that in three weeks. Doing design research in a completely unfamiliar and different context with unpredictable behaviors and motivations was simply.. fascinating. All assumptions were naturally dropped and Shanghai just kept surprising.
For testing the final service concept we built a board game which turned out to be a huge success- both for us as a great validator for our ideas and for the testers- who just could not stop playing.
100Dancers or the story of one magic carpet flight
100dancers festival this summer was a week of dancing and experimentation. A week of flying high in the sky and rarely stepping down to touch the wet Warsaw grass. A week of artistic inspiration, of expanding horizons and a week of happiness. A week that’s hard to write about without swinging in my office chair.
The aim of the 100dancers project is to facilitate international artistic exchange and collaboration between contact improvisation dancers, choreographers and artists. It’s in a way a ‘dancing conference’ where everyone brings their own ideas, talents and expertise and gets a chance to explore their passions together with other participants. The whole experience of the festival is rooted in concepts of the moment, the NOW, of dialogue and of improvisation. One of the main themes of the festival is site-specific choreography, where artists explore different constructive and social landscapes and improvise reflecting and telling stories based on the particular environment of the moment.
Our team participated as media artists and documentors of the festival. We started working several weeks before the festival- first coming up with dozens of ideas for interactive performances and then eventually skinning them down to those most fascinating for us. We build the systems using Kinect sensors and Processing environment with SimpleOpenNi library. During the festival we continued developing the installations together with the dancer. They took installation in their own unique way, getting rid of all the complexity of interactions and concentrating on contact, direct feedback and storytelling.
“Kid in me day”
concept from Global Service Jam Helsinki 24-26 Feb 2012
Fires and Tears – the chaos of yesterday and tomorrow
The interactive performance “Fires and Tears” version 2.0 was presented yesterday at Taik’s MediaLab demo day. The visuals of the performance were inspired by the traces of ancient people in Qobustan and music of the Faradzh Karaev ‘s“Shadows of Gobustan” ballet (1969).
To read more about the hardware and software side of the project, please refer to the previous post.
This piece is one of my personal favorites, and I am very enthusiastic about continuing working on it. If you are a dancer, a media artist or someone else to whom this looks interesting and you have some feelings or ideas about it, please don’t hesitate to contact me!
Wild interactive performance piece (work in progress)
The land I was born on was home to people since the times they hardly distinguished from the animal world. Their lives chaotic, their survival heavily dependent on the moods of Nature- the power that they could not comprehend but only be fearful of. This work is the first attempt of creating an interactive performance piece that would reflect on their lives- lit by the colors of the sky, water, sun and fire and filled with sounds of wind, sea and music by Faradzh Karaev from “Shadows of Gobustan” ballet (1969).
The interaction is build using Kinect and Processing with SimpleOpenNI libraries. Kinect is tracking my head and hands, and this data is then turned into real-time graphics. The project is done under supervision of Ferhat Sen. The complete version of this work should be ready by the end of May.
In this video the imagery is mirrored, but in the next version it would be mapped to performer’s movements.
Engaging audience – low-fat recepie
Everyday more and more companies discover the great power of social media. Businesses adopt different approaches as part of their IMC strategies, attempting to build and maintain a strong and lasting relationship with their consumers. Those who overlook this trend of company-customer communication are doomed to very soon falling behind their progressive competitors.
This phenomenon, for the most part, is explained by the simple fact that contemporary consumer likes to be heard (notably, 20 years ago customer would be able to share her satisfaction/concern with just several other people, whears today she can easily reach millions). Yet, company-customer relationship can go far beyond simple feedback forms. G.Mangold and D.Faulds in their paper “Social media: the new hybrid element of the promotion mix” provide a delicious recipe of strong consumer engagement:
- Provide networking platforms
- Use blogs and other social media to engage customers
- Use both traditional and Internet-based promotional tools to engage customers
- Provide information
- Be outrageous
- Provide exclusivity
- Design products with talking points and consumers’ desired self-images in mind
- Support causes that are important to consumers
- Utilize the power of stories
In short, the advice is to foster engagement of consumers with your product: support communities and causes, organize sweepstakes, competitions and voting, fulfill wishes and dreams. On my behalf, I’d just add: be creative; contribute constantly and consumers pay off will be three-fold.