BlueHair: Interaction & Product Design

Tag: Football

  • 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…)

  • 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…)

  • 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)

  • Virtual goals: introducing new technology into the game of football

    For our Interactive Technology Design (ITD) course as part of my Design for Interaction master (TU Delft), we were asked to work on introducing interactive technology into the Cruyff Courts (free access outdoor football fields throughout the Netherlands) so that we could enhance their playability and attractiveness, with an specific emphasis on integrating more girls into the fields, as it was found that they were not making much use of the courts even though they like the game and girl-football is on the rise.

    We came up with the concept of “Virtual Goals”, which consists of replacing the normal goals and nets we have today by two large surface areas on each side of the field, in which different types of goals will be displayed according to (more…)

  • Willy Valdera – FifaColombia’s mascot

    Willy ValderaWillie Valdera is my first and so far only attempt at character creation. It was conceived as FifaColombia.com’s mascot and as such, he is an Andean condor (Colombia’s national symbol). His name is a wink at Willington Ortiz and Carlos “El Pibe” Valderrama, the 2 best colombian players of all time.

    I created a couple of screen-savers that could be downloaded from FifaColombia.com. They featured Willy Valdera wearing the jersey of different South American clubs and national teams.

    An example of the animation used for the screen-saver can be seen underneath. (more…)

  • FifaColombia.com – a website dedicated to football video games

    FifaColombia.com is one of my oldest projects, which is now out of service but it still made me proud back on it’s day.

    It was my own personal football website with a very big fan base, dedicated to football video games from the Fifa Series (EA Sports).It offered news, wallpapers and original, custom made material for the game so as to include Colombian and Latin-American teams into it.

    Unfortunately, once I started my studies in the Netherlands, the time was just not enough to keep the site going and it was slowly but surely abandoned.

    Fifa Colombia - 01

    (more…)