As part of the Future of Health report published last week in associated with Unicef, PSFK interviewed key innovators during thir research to illuminate ideas and innovation developing in healthcare.

PSFK talked with the creators of ASHA a phone-based app that helps reunite families and loved ones torn apart by disasters and conflict, through simple relay-based networks using humans and cell phones to carry tiny packages of information. ASHA was created by Anders Højmose, Martina Pagura and Ulrik A. Hogrebe as part of a Graphical User Interface class at The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID).

Red the original post here: Original Post on PSFK here.

Tell us about the Asha project and any developments since its creation.

“Well in all it´s simplicity, ASHA is an iphone app that helps reunite families and loved ones torn apart by disasters and conflict. Quite simply, the app automatically sends and receives simple information (name, simple geo-location etc.) over bluetooth – and in this way, allows for rescue workers and refugees to collect names and locations of people as they move around independently of established communication infrastructure. Think of it as an ambient information collector- it just queries the surroundings for information – and if it finds some, it enters it into its memory and shares it the next time somebody else shows up with a ASHA equipped phone. In this way, you could be stuck in a refugee camp in one location, but that your relatives are OK and safe in another camp, because a rescue worker moving between camps has picked them up on his phone. But there is a video that exemplifies all that much better.

However,what is smart about ASHA is that it is not “just an iphone” app that has little relevance outside of affluent societies (although you could imagine it being highly useful in for example the aftermath of 9/11 where people in NYC struggled to find their loved ones). Basically it uses relatively advanced but also relatively inexpensive technology (the iphone) to empower very low level but also very pervasive technology – i.e. basically every low-level Bluetooth enabled mobile phone out there. While these low-level phones are not advanced enough / have enough capacity to receive large amounts of data, they can transmit a simple “Hello, my name is so-and-so” Bluetooth beacon which can then be picked up by rescue workers or other deployed personnel who typically are the most mobile in case of an emergency. Rescue workers can sync their phones and in this way become living ad-hoc information carriers. We did some very conservative calculations and worked out that 50 ASHA apps in the field, picking up 13 names a day would give you roughly 4500 names and locations of refugees in a week. Now imagine having hundreds and hundreds of rescue workers, NGO´s, doctors etc, like we saw in Haiti, all passing on information – that could give you unparalleled up-to-date information of where people are, plus loads of extra data like movement patterns etc. which could help faster relief, epidemic prevention and so on.”

We’re talking today because I want to understand trends at the intersection of health and technology. How your project is related with these concepts?

“Now paradoxically, this seems like such an easy solution that one wonders why its not already in place and ready to go. Of course the reality is, that no mobile phone has an emergency setting that triggers a “Hello, my name is” Bluetooth beacon. And to be honest, we knew this all along, while we were designing the app, but that was not really the point. You see, what ASHA reveals is the enormous life saving potential, that we all carry around with us in our pockets. Tapping into this when designing the next generation of phones or thinking about how we can upgrade existing ones, could unlock enormous benefits. It is almost unbelievable that phones do not have a standardized, robust, free, low-level emergency protocol – something that just says “hello I am here! Help me!”. Think of people trapped under rubble or mudslides, of refugees moving from country to country, of kidnap and slave trade victims. There are a 1000 uses for something at that level alone.

We believe that, in terms of global safety issues and particularly in the case of global health concerns, there is a gaping hole that could be filled with this kind of thinking. We see howapplications and technologies are being developed that monitor heartbeat, blood levels, exercise, diet and all sorts of things that we as westerners have every right to be worried about – don’t get us wrong.But it seems ironic that here we as westerners are walking around in these great big data bubbles, worrying whether we should have that dressing with our salad, and in the mean time the developing world are combating AIDS epidemics that threaten to wipe out generations, tuberculosis, malnutrition and a health system that is almost nonexistent + plus a bevy of much much worse epidemics that literally are just waiting to transfer into humans. And nobody seems to be designing for them, nobody seems to be interested in affording them the same level of data. Imagine what we could be doing, if we could just give people something as seemingly simple as an electronic medical journal that could follow the patient using the same low-tech principals that ASHA is built on. You could even use a system like ASHA to transmit a journal number along with a name, allowing UNICEF and other NGO´s to access centralized, up-to-date records from refugees and others outside the institutionalized healthcare systems – both to provide immediate relief for the patient but also to harvest data that could potentially have global benefits.”

As a focus to the project – we are looking to aid UNICEF and likeminded organizations with new ideas. UNICEF’s work involves remote health workers. How could your project or a similar one be developed to support such work?

“In conclusion, we believe that ASHA exemplifies allot of the principals, that we should be considering when designing for deployed healthcare or rescue workers. Firstly, it utilizes the flexibility and power of advanced technology to get the best out of low-level, but pervasive technology. We need to be thinking about what is already out there and how we access that. Secondly, our system tries to circumvent the need for functioning infrastructures and instead relies on very basic human interaction – theidea that humans and not cables carry information is in no way a new one and so, once again we should be looking at what behaviors arealready out there, instead of trying to disrupt peoples routines and to teach them something new, often when they are in the worst possible situations of their lives, hungry, afraid, sick, etc. We need to always ask ourselves what do people do naturally and how can we utilize that?

Thirdly and finally, we need to look at both low-level needs and high-level advantages. With ASHA we are addressing an immediate problem -a person has lost his loved ones and will be traumatized by that loss for ever, affecting his well-being as a person and as a citizen. At the same time, we are gathering data that can benefit the situation as a whole – and possibly make a dent into the suffering caused by epidemics, conflicts, disasters etc on a global scale.”

PSFK’s Future of Health Report details 15 trends that will impact health and wellness around the world. Simple advances such as off-the-grid energy and the introduction of gaming into healthcare service offerings sit alongside more future-forward developments such as bio-medical printing. The report includes concepts for UNICEF based on the trends provided by the world’s leading advertising and design agencies. It is our hope that this report will inspire your thinking and lead to services, applications and technologies which will allow for more available, quality healthcare.

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Dean McNamee recently did a one week project conducted for The Times in London, focusing on visualizing data from the 2010 World Cup. Detailed data of plays and positions were aggregated across teams and players, with the goal of creating “at a glance” graphics, telling an instant story about the cup as a whole.

Custom software was written to analyze shots, passes, and tackles across players and teams, generating a few hundred heat-map graphics mapping these different events across the football pitch.

Four of the graphics were printed in Monday July 19th’s edition of The Times.

All of the graphics were published in the online edition of The Times, along with an interactive 3D visualization of tackles by team. The 3D visualization software was custom written in JavaScript and HTML5, creating an engaging and interactive experience across platforms and mobile devices such as the iPad.

A republished version of the 3D visualization is available here

Ashwin Rajan interviewed by Marcia Caines for Cluster

“Eighty percent of the environmental impact of the products, services, and infrastructures around us is determined at the design stage. Design decisions shape the processes behind the products we use, the materials and energy required to make them, the ways we operate them on a daily basis, and what happens to them when we no longer need them. We may not have meant to do so, and we may regret the way things have turned out, but we designed our way into the situations that face us today.” John Thackara – In the Bubble.

AR: A comment before you fire away. I dig John Thackara, but I see what he’s addressing here very differently. The situation on the ground being what it is: financial, market, and political decisions drive our collective use of processes and products, and their use and disposal. Products and services come to market, are adopted, used and tossed away in waves of spontaneous consumer indulgence pursued by an orchestrated effort to sustain market share. It’s not as elegant and thought out as Thackara describes, because to ‘design’ anything would be to think it through to its logical extremes. In fact, what Thackara supposes here is exactly what is not happening in my view: practices that offer ways to design for systemic consequences are not very influential in our global society at all. And the position that designers and design thinkers are seeking today is one that situates them much more centrally in processes that have ignored design for way too long, at everyone’s peril.

Read the full interview here: http://www.cluster.eu

The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design offers a sophisticated post-experience program in interaction design, attracting students from Denmark and all over the world, as well as consulting with companies and organizations. They have a lot of really interesting projects on their website spanning a range of sixteen courses. It’s well worth a browse!

I was there last week to give a talk called Teaching & Learning Design. I made a pdf of the slides that you can download here if you want. It’s a bird’s-eye view of design, first looking at different types of design and then identifying ways of learning how to practice them, with some examples of my ideas about the best teaching environments. I also talked about the ways in which the contexts that frame our design activities are expanding, drawing on some examples from the current show at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the National Design Triennial, Why Design Now?

I first met Gillian Crampton Smith in 1989 when she joined the faculty at London’s Royal College of Art to start an interaction design program, for which I became the external assessor and then visiting professor. It was called CRD (Computer Related Design) and was the first graduate program where designers could learn to apply their skills to interactive products and systems.

In 2001 Gillian moved to Ivrea, the Italian town in the foothills of the Alps famous as the home of Olivetti, to establish IDII (Interaction Design Institute Ivrea), which offered a post-experience interaction design program producing very interesting and influential work.

Simona Maschi was one of the teachers in Ivrea. When IDII closed in 2005, Gillian moved to teach in Venice, and Simona moved to Denmark with a group of colleagues and friends to found CIID. These pioneers of teaching interaction design have helped this new design discipline emerge and become accepted.

Some argue that interaction design, meaning the design of everything digital, can no longer be considered a separate discipline, because all of the design disciplines now reside in a digital world. I agree that everything that can be digital will be, but I still think there is a lot of value in learning how to design in virtual space, gaining fluency in thinking about the abstractions of the digital realm, such as user’s conceptual models or navigation journeys.

See Bill’s original post here: http://blog.cooperhewitt.org

As part of our work with UNICEF, PSFK talked with the creators of ASHA a phone-based app that helps reunite families and loved ones torn apart by disasters and conflict, through simple relay-based networks using humans and cell phones to carry tiny packages of information. ASHA was created by Anders Højmose, Martina Pagura and Ulrik A. Hogrebe as part of a Graphical User Interface class at The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID).

Tell us about the Asha project and any developments since its creation.

“Well in all it´s simplicity, ASHA is an iphone app that helps reunite families and loved ones torn apart by disasters and conflict. Quite simply, the app automatically sends and receives simple information (name, simple geo-location etc.) over bluetooth – and in this way, allows for rescue workers and refugees to collect names and locations of people as they move around independently of established communication infrastructure. Think of it as an ambient information collector- it just queries the surroundings for information – and if it finds some, it enters it into its memory and shares it the next time somebody else shows up with a ASHA equipped phone. In this way, you could be stuck in a refugee camp in one location, but that your relatives are OK and safe in another camp, because a rescue worker moving between camps has picked them up on his phone. But there is a video that exemplifies all that much better.

Asha – reuniting refugees across the world from Ulrik Andersen Hogrebe on Vimeo.

However,what is smart about ASHA is that it is not “just an iphone” app that has little relevance outside of affluent societies (although you could imagine it being highly useful in for example the aftermath of 9/11 where people in NYC struggled to find their loved ones). Basically it uses relatively advanced but also relatively inexpensive technology (the iphone) to empower very low level but also very pervasive technology – i.e. basically every low-level Bluetooth enabled mobile phone out there. While these low-level phones are not advanced enough / have enough capacity to receive large amounts of data, they can transmit a simple “Hello, my name is so-and-so” Bluetooth beacon which can then be picked up by rescue workers or other deployed personnel who typically are the most mobile in case of an emergency. Rescue workers can sync their phones and in this way become living ad-hoc information carriers. We did some very conservative calculations and worked out that 50 ASHA apps in the field, picking up 13 names a day would give you roughly 4500 names and locations of refugees in a week. Now imagine having hundreds and hundreds of rescue workers, NGO´s, doctors etc, like we saw in Haiti, all passing on information – that could give you unparalleled up-to-date information of where people are, plus loads of extra data like movement patterns etc. which could help faster relief, epidemic prevention and so on.”

We’re talking today because I want to understand trends at the intersection of health and technology. How your project is related with these concepts?

“Now paradoxically, this seems like such an easy solution that one wonders why its not already in place and ready to go. Of course the reality is, that no mobile phone has an emergency setting that triggers a “Hello, my name is” Bluetooth beacon. And to be honest, we knew this all along, while we were designing the app, but that was not really the point. You see, what ASHA reveals is the enormous life saving potential, that we all carry around with us in our pockets. Tapping into this when designing the next generation of phones or thinking about how we can upgrade existing ones, could unlock enormous benefits. It is almost unbelievable that phones do not have a standardized, robust, free, low-level emergency protocol – something that just says “hello I am here! Help me!”. Think of people trapped under rubble or mudslides, of refugees moving from country to country, of kidnap and slave trade victims. There are a 1000 uses for something at that level alone.

We believe that, in terms of global safety issues and particularly in the case of global health concerns, there is a gaping hole that could be filled with this kind of thinking. We see howapplications and technologies are being developed that monitor heartbeat, blood levels, exercise, diet and all sorts of things that we as westerners have every right to be worried about – don’t get us wrong.But it seems ironic that here we as westerners are walking around in these great big data bubbles, worrying whether we should have that dressing with our salad, and in the mean time the developing world are combating AIDS epidemics that threaten to wipe out generations, tuberculosis, malnutrition and a health system that is almost nonexistent + plus a bevy of much much worse epidemics that literally are just waiting to transfer into humans. And nobody seems to be designing for them, nobody seems to be interested in affording them the same level of data. Imagine what we could be doing, if we could just give people something as seemingly simple as an electronic medical journal that could follow the patient using the same low-tech principals that ASHA is built on. You could even use a system like ASHA to transmit a journal number along with a name, allowing UNICEF and other NGO´s to access centralized, up-to-date records from refugees and others outside the institutionalized healthcare systems – both to provide immediate relief for the patient but also to harvest data that could potentially have global benefits.”

As a focus to the project – we are looking to aid UNICEF and likeminded organizations with new ideas. UNICEF’s work involves remote health workers. How could your project or a similar one be developed to support such work?

“In conclusion, we believe that ASHA exemplifies allot of the principals, that we should be considering when designing for deployed healthcare or rescue workers. Firstly, it utilizes the flexibility and power of advanced technology to get the best out of low-level, but pervasive technology. We need to be thinking about what is already out there and how we access that. Secondly, our system tries to circumvent the need for functioning infrastructures and instead relies on very basic human interaction – theidea that humans and not cables carry information is in no way a new one and so, once again we should be looking at what behaviors arealready out there, instead of trying to disrupt peoples routines and to teach them something new, often when they are in the worst possible situations of their lives, hungry, afraid, sick, etc. We need to always ask ourselves what do people do naturally and how can we utilize that?

Thirdly and finally, we need to look at both low-level needs and high-level advantages. With ASHA we are addressing an immediate problem -a person has lost his loved ones and will be traumatized by that loss for ever, affecting his well-being as a person and as a citizen. At the same time, we are gathering data that can benefit the situation as a whole – and possibly make a dent into the suffering caused by epidemics, conflicts, disasters etc on a global scale.”

Over the next few weeks, PSFK is running a trends research and innovation project in association with UNICEF. We will be researching (with your help) the development of key trends that impact health and wellbeing and then using our findings to develop with partners concepts that UNICEF and likeminded organizations could consider deploying across the world.

Find out more here: PSFK presents the Future Of Health in association with UNICEF

Original post here: http://www.psfk.com

by Anders Højmose, Jennifer Kay, Mary Huang and David Sjunnesson

The revamped toaster plays a selection of music depending on the bread you put in to “toast”, because it doesn’t work as a toaster anymore. 125 songs covered 5 genres: Reggae, Country, Rock, Electro and Latin within 5 categories of moods: party, melancholy, obscure, chill out and feel good. Simple but effective “bread detection” is achieved by using white LEDs and photo-resistors to measure the darkness of the bread. Additional LEDs are included to retain the familiar orange glow of the toasting cycle.

Original post here: http://studiobanana.tv

Elektronikduo laver sange på en Game Boy fra 1989
Ingeniørnørderne i La Belle Indifference udgør et af Danmarks få Game Boy-band.

Koncerten starter med en lyd, som får alle, der var børn i 1990’erne, til at huske, hvad der stod øverst på deres ønskeseddel til jul.

»Bliip!«, lyder det fra de to Game Boy Classics fra 1989, der ligger som instrumentelle hovedpersoner på en boks på scenen.

I aften skal de over 20 år gamle håndholdte spillekonsoller dog ikke bruges til hverken at klare baner i ’Mario Brothers’ eller bygge vandrette rækker i Tetris. I stedet fungerer de to maskiner som hovedinstrumenterne i Game Boy-bandet La Belle Indifferences koncert.

»Vi spiller på Game Boy«
Duoen spiller på to Game Boys i en rød og en transparent version.

Maskinerne, der er på størrelse med en stor mandehånd, er udstyret med skærm, A- og B-knapper og piletaster, der normalt ville få Mario til at gå frem og tilbage, skyde og hoppe. Men i aften skal knapperne i stedet bruges som en art strenge eller tangenter.

»Vi hedder La Belle Indifference, og vi spiller på Game Boy«, råber Jacob Sikker Remin fra bandet til publikum foran sig. Han trykker to gange på den røde Game Boys A-knap, og en melodi af blip-blip-blip-lyde går i gang.

Jacob Sikker Remin was a Pilot Year Student at CIID where he created ‘BIG FAT OPEN’: an open source platform for musical exploration, composition and performance.

Read the full article by Sandra Brovall here: http://ibyen.dk

A project developed by Dean McNamee and Filippo Cuttica during the TUI class, @ CIID. Go with the Flow is a tangible user interface that allows the user to visualize and filter the incoming emails. Divided in category by tags as “work”, “family”, and “friends”, the emails are represented by coloured water that drops from 3 tanks in 3 different tubes. The user will be able to decide the amount of emails from the different category of users he wants to receive in his inbox. The concept, even if meant to be a ’statement object’ will to help the people who work at home to better divide their personal and work lives. Using a ‘liquid membrane’ more than a solid barrier.

Posted on Design You Trust by Dmitry

Ishac Bertran, student at the newly established Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, talks about the intersection between technology, design and art.

Much technological progress in recent years can be ascribed to the open source model which has taken the innovation process out of the lab and opened it up to anybody who feels called upon to contribute. But while much open source development is still the exclusive domain of ‘techies’, a parallel movement or discipline is beginning to take shape. In the emerging field of interaction design, as some describe it, technology is entering the realm of design, art and craft. Will art inspire technological innovation? We spoke to Ishac Bertran, a student at the new Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID).

Continue Reading >

Filipo Cuttica, Jacek Barcikowski and Ulrik Hogrebe teamed up to develop an RFID enabled speaker system that allows the user to interact with music and the environment by moving the speakers around. ‘this is a journey into sound’ consists of a grid of RFID tags that correspond to different genres of music. the two speakers work independently, playing the music of the tag they are placed on. putting the two speakers together syncs them together and plays the same song. more speakers can be added to the installation and other factors can turn the speakers into music creators, altering pitch and effects based on other factors like rotation and position.

Posted on Designboom

http://www.ulrikhogrebe.com
http://www.skylined.pl