BlueHair: Interaction & Product Design

Category: Interaction Design

  • TOKENS: Books and libraries of the future

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    I’ve already made a post before talking about the Personal Area Libraries, one of our concepts in our attempt to design the books and libraries of the future. Today it’s time to show our second concept, the Tokens. You can see the results of our initial research by visiting the previous post so that you can understand why we came up with this concept, but in the mean time and just to give you an idea, here’s the vision we developed as a starting point:

    “In a world full of volatile digital media, people feel distant and unconnected from their reading material. It’s so easy to copy and distribute media that its very possession has lost its value.
    We want to bring this value back to the people.”

    So here it goes:

    THE READING MATERIAL:

    The reading material is independent of the eReader itself. It is carried individually (more…)

  • “World Builder”: Minority Report, eat your heart out!

    Some one sent me a link to this very beautiful short movie, which shows some awesome holographic interfaces, and I just had to share it here. Not much more to say, but WATCH IT! it will certainly be worth the 9 minutes of your time.


    World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

  • Personal Area Libraries (PALs): Books and Libraries of the future

    [iframe src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/11309766?byline=0″ width=”630″ height=”473″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen]

    As part of a project for the TU Delft and together with my good friends Job Greefhorst and Amine Rhord, we set out to design the books and libraries of the future. We followed some context mapping techniques to understand the domain of reading in general as a first step for our process. I will explain the process in a later post, as it was quite interesting and it will give me a chance to explain some of these context mapping techniques in greater detail, but in the mean time, I’ll just stick to the results of our research which are more than plenty for a single post, and of course I will show you one of the two concepts that we came up with (the other one will also come on a later post).

    So let’s get started…

    THE READING DOMAIN CONTEXT

    We wanted to know what people thought of their books, how they stored them, why they liked them, why they (more…)

  • The wonderful Wizard of Oz… Prototype

    wizard-of-ozI’ve talked before about the Virtual Goals project that I worked on a few months back, and in this post I’d like to talk a bit more about one of the techniques that we used during the project: Wizard of Oz prototyping

    This technique (named of course after the famous book by L. Frank Baum) is in my opinion one of the most powerful ways of experimenting and developing user interfaces dealing with smart systems, because it allows you to test even when there is no smart system to start with!

    The idea is fairly simple:  you make a prototype in which all of the actions which will eventually be attributed to the computer system are actually performed by a person.

    Let’s illustrate with an example; let’s say you want to make a system that recognizes (more…)

  • The delivery of the future (PART V) – An example of Vision in Product Design (ViP) being used

    vip_designing_interaction_levelWith my MSc. graduation project now in full swing, I havent had much time to dedicate to posting things, but I figured that this could be a nice way of clearing my mind, so today I’ll continue with the ongoing series of posts explaining the Vision in Product Design (ViP) process.

    PART 5:

    DESIGNING – THE INTERACTION LEVEL

    By following the ViP methodology, the next step in our process was to think about the interaction level in the future context. In this new step the idea is to identify a number of interaction qualities which are relevant in our attempt to achieve the vision that we conceived in the previous phase, but without thinking of any particular product yet.

    These qualities of interaction will be of great importance for the (more…)

  • Designing the new prEmo – An empirical research on how to improve the emotion measuring tool

    premo2A while back I was working together with Pieter Desmet, an associate professor at the Industrial Design faculty of the TU Delft, in a project aiming to improve prEmo, a tool to measure emotions towards products.

    The tool proved to be very effective, but it still had some points to it that could be enhanced, so that’s why we started working on a newer version of it.

    For anyone interested in this kind of studies, you can download a copy of the final document that I wrote reporting on the steps that were followed, the methodologies used, and of course the results from our study.

    You can download a copy by clicking on the link below:

    PDF: designing-the-new-premo-david-guiza-caicedo-2009.pdf

  • So what do you feel in a hotel???

    hotel_surveyI haven’t published much lately, due mostly to the fact that I started with my graduation project. But OK, it was time to get back on this, and what a better way than to ask for help with the project itself!

    For my MSc. Graduation project, I’m conducting a small study regarding the emotions you experience while in a hotel, and I’d like to ask your help remembering some of the times that you have stayed in a hotel and tell me some of the things you’ve experienced by using the following online survey:
    www.bluehaired.com/hotel_survey

    It can take as little as 5 minutes to help a bit and I will really appreciate your time and effort.

    If you have any questions or comments regarding the study or what I will do with its results, I’ll be glad to answer any doubts, so just drop me a line.

    And if you are curious as to exactly what I’m doing with my project, you can take a look at my proposal which is in the PDF below.

    [UPDATE: you can now actually find the results and a scientific paper regarding the study HERE]

    PDF:

  • The delivery of the future (PART IV) – An example of Vision in Product Design (ViP) being used

    vip_designing_context_levelToday is freezing outside and there isn’t the slightest chance that I’m going out there… so in the meantime I figured I can continue with the Vision in Product Design (ViP) example I’ve been writing about lately.

    This is quite a lenghty post, so let’s just jump straight to the point.

    PART 4:

    DESIGNING – THE CONTEXT LEVEL

    At this point, we’ve already reached the designing phase of the process, and we start by defining the future context.

    DRIVING FACTORS FOR THE FUTURE

    Within the VIP process the use of factors is intended to assist the deconstruction of the present world context in order to map probable and predictable features/aspects on a projected future.

    Factors can be divided in four distinctive (more…)

  • The delivery of the future (PART II) – An example of Vision in Product Design (ViP) being used

    vip_deconstruction_interaction_levelIn a previous post I discussed the very first step of the Vision in Product Design (ViP) process, the deconstruction at a product level. On this post, I’ll be showing examples of the next step, deconstruction at an interaction level, and how we handled it in our project to design the delivery of the future. If you havent read it, I suggest you read that one before diving into this one.

    But if you’ve already read it… let’s jump right to it!

    PART 2:
    DECONSTRUCTION – THE INTERACTION LEVEL

    The interaction qualities characterizing the relationship between the Combis and the different users involved with it was analysed though a brainstorming session where the team reflected, with a play role technique, the qualities which can be perceived from the interaction of these (more…)

  • Low-Fi prototyping: Cheap & easy, but damn good!

    Prototyping is an iterative process that allows you to test, evaluate and implement changes to your design during the developing process before arriving to a final solution, and experiential prototyping is no exception to this. The designer is thus encouraged to produce and test prototypes along the whole development process. But since prototyping can be very effort and time consuming, it is important to know what type of prototyping techniques are more appropiate at different stages.

    The concept of prototype “fidelity” is defined by the level of detail used in making it, and dus how closely does the prototype resembles the “real thing”. For example, in software and graphical user interface design, low-fi prototyping can be achieved with simple tools such as paper and colored pencils, with which a quick and dirty sketch of an interface can be drawn on different sheets of paper and be tested (and most importantly fixed) on the run before any code is written at all, and it allows people from other disciplines to be able to collaborate.

    low fidelity prototyping also adds the extra advantage of a quick and unfinished “look”, which will (more…)

  • PrEmo: a tool to measure emotional responses

    PrEmo is a tool to measure emotional responses towards products, originally developed by Pieter Desmet at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft. It uses animated characters to portray a certain number of emotions, which a person can use to describe in a non verbal way the kind of emotions that he feels towards a product.

    I had the chance to work in a research project in the past in which I compared this tool to a more semantic tool (the Geneva Emotions Wheel) which gave us some very good insights into how this tool could be enhanced. Together with Pieter Desmet, it was decided that a follow up project was needed in order to make a newer version of the tool with the findings of the first study as a basis.

    I you are interested in helping out with this study, please visit www.bluehaired.com/premo and fillin our questionnaire. Here you willbe able to see the evolution of the original tool and give us some feedback about it.

    And of course, if you are interested in the results or the study in general, you can always drop me a line and I’ll be happy to give you more information.

  • Vision in Product Design (The ViP approach)

    Vision in Product Design (the so called ViP approach) is a design framework developed in the mid 90’s by Paul Hekkert, Matthijs van Dijk and Peter Lloyd at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands.

    For those of you interested in innovation and design, my opinion is that this IS the way to go. And apparently a couple of big names such as Audi, Pininfarina, Nokia and Whirlpool also seem to think the same way.

    Here’s the scoop:

    ViP is a design approach that has three starting points:

    1. Design is about looking for possibilities, and possible futures, instead of solving present-day problems.
    2. Products are a means of accomplishing appropriate (more…)

  • EVOthing about interaction design

    I helped Evi to make a few minor adjustments to her site recently, and with a tweak here and there, I have to say that it really looks fantastic! This is trully one of my favourite websites. A very nice and clean design: Simple, beautiful, elegant and playful at the same time.

    The website, of course, is Evi Malisianou’s portfolio site, an interaction designer from the TU Delft with a background in interior architecture and product design. On it, you will find a bunch of her very inspiring projects (would love to have a few of those on my own portfolio), along with pictures, videos and detailed reports of her work.

    If you are into quality interaction design (with a strong background of user centered research), you should definitely take a look at her website: www.EVOthing.com

  • VirtualGoals: enhancing the playability of football through the use of interactive technologies

    Johan Cruyff foundationRelevant Keywords:

    Football, interactive technology, prototyping, user testing, wizard of oz.

    Design Goal:

    At playgrounds, the sport courts are very popular and are used intensively for playing football. It is however strange that these sport courts are hardly used by girls, despite the strong growth in the popularity of girl football in the last few years. Our design goal was to develop an interactive installation for sport courts and in particular the Cruyff courts. By adding interactive technology to the game of football we want to enhance the playability of the playgrounds.

    Project duration and team:

    120 hours, 3 interaction designers (David Güiza Caicedo, Nouschka Tijdeman, Ferdinand van Oostrom)

    Methods used:

    • Experiential prototyping
    • Wizard of Oz prototyping
    • Mid-Fi prototyping
    • User testing

    (more…)

  • Virtual Goals: Technology in the Cruyff Courts

    So, this is the final paper that we wrote regarding our Virtual Goals project. It’s quite interesting to take a look at it to follow the full story of how we developed the concept and how we tested it with various prototyping techniques.

    Here’s the abstract:
    “The Cruyff courts are very popular outdoor, public sports facilities in The Netherlands, but unfortunately they are not as attractive to girls as they do not like playing with boys. In this paper we describe our attempt to apply new technology into these fields in order to attract girls to them without making them less attractive for boys. Various experiential prototypes were built to test our proposals.”

    To read the full paper click on the link below:

    LINK : Virtual Goals: Technology in the Cruyff Courts (PDF)

  • PALS & Tokens: Conceptual design for books and libraries of the future

    PALS_thumb

    Relevant Keywords:

    Reading, books,  future scenario, conceptual design, context research

    Design Goal:

    As part of a design exercise at the TU Delft we were asked to research the domain of books and libraries and to propose a concept design of how these would be like in a future scenario. The focus was laid on the concept and interactions rather than on technical details of the products.

    Project duration and team:

    75 hours, 3 interaction designers (David Güiza Caicedo, Job Greefhorst, Amine Rhord)

    Methods Used:

    • Vision in Product Design (ViP) was used as a design framework throughout the whole project
    • Cultural probes
    • Creative session
    • Presentation videos

    (more…)