BlueHair: Interaction & Product Design

Category: Blog

  • World Solar Challenge: TU Delft’s ‘Nuna’ to keep the winning streak

    The World Solar Challenge is a renowned solar-powered car race run every 2 years since 1987 through the Australian outback with participants from all over the world. The TU Delft has been participating and winning every single event (kicking ass I may add) since 2001 with their car, Nuna.

    This coming October the prestigious race will be ran again and this year’s team from the TU has a big responsibility on their shoulders to try and win their 5th consecutive event. The team is already in Australia preparing for the big event and in the mean time I wanted to post a collection of cool videos from this years Nuna 5.

    Good luck to them, and I hope that they bring a new title back home!

  • Metro de Bogotá: is this really what the city needs right now? / Realmente lo que la ciudad necesita en este momento?

    [Texto en español mas adelante]

    The mayor of Bogota has just released this new video to promote the construction of the ‘Metro de Bogotá’. It’s kind’a cool and gives a nice overview of the design of the first line of Bogota’s metro which should in theory be constructed in the coming years.

    [iframe src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/75953946?byline=0″ width=”630″ height=”347″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen]

    I’ve always thought that Bogota has been left behind in the stone age of mobility by not having some sort of rail solution operating. There have been many attempts to design and put in motion it’s construction since as early as the 1950’s, and millions have been spent by different local administrations over the years in viability studies and early designs for the metro grid.

    This time however, it seems that they actually mean to take it to the next level and build the damn thing after all. But a big question arises: is this really what Bogota needs? (more…)

  • emoments: Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services

    emoments_thumb

    Relevant Keywords:

    MSc. Graduation project, evaluating emotions, services, consumer experience, hotels, mobile application, prototyping

    Design Goal:

    Various methods are available for measuring emotional responses elicited by products (design) or human-product interaction. Up to this point however, no instrument was available that could be used to assess emotional service experiences. The aim of the project was to extend the possibilities of assessing emotions to the realm of experiential service design. As a case study for the project, the focus was laid on the `hotel experience’, that is, the experience of a guest while staying at a hotel.

    Project duration:

    5 months (full time)

    Methods Used:

    • Thorough literature research to become acquainted with the project domain.
    • Online survey to identify the most common types of emotions experienced by hotel guests and the stimuli associated with these experiences.
    • Creative session organized with a panel of users and designers to generate ideas.
    • Early prototyping to perform user testing of concepts.
    • Creation of wire-frames and navigation flow-charts to define the software’s architecture.
    • Hi-Fi prototyping of final concept.
    • Usability testing.

    (more…)

  • Measuring and evaluating emotions towards physical spaces

    emotional_space1Well, it’s kind’a cool at the deep end of the pool. Two months into my current status as a Master of Science I’m having lots of fun working on a temporary basis (let’s hope that changes soon) with the good people at Susa Group, the company that I worked for during my graduation project.

    And it’s lots of fun because I’m doing something which I really enjoy, and we are working on transforming one of the concepts I developed during graduation into a fully working and marketable tool which hopefully people will be using in a very, very near future.

    It’s still a work in progress, but the idea is to develop a tool that can help in measuring and evaluating emotions towards  physical spaces. This opens up the door to a plethora of possibilities and applications: evaluating an urban environment to know how people feel about their surroundings (emotions in architecture and urbanism), finding out how people feel about that new interior design that you are developing for a new store (emotions in retail design) or identifying the critical emotional points of a restaurant or of a hotel lobby (emotions in experiential services) are but a few of the examples I can think of. (more…)