CIID/DKDS invite you to the end-of-year exhibition of the Interaction Design Programme 2009/10.

The final projects demonstrate the multidisciplinary and questioning nature of Interaction Design and Service Design. A number of projects are provocative – answering poignant questions about topics such as fatal illness and mental health. Others tackle subjects such as sustainability, healthy eating or how we can use existing technology and services to improve our local environment. By applying the ‘learning by doing’ approach to their work, the students have produced an impressive collection of working prototypes.

The exhibition will be a celebration of the hard work, creativity and talent of the Interaction Design Programme students – with many things to see, prototypes to interact with and even a few experiments taking place. This was an exciting academic year and Revolve sets out to reflect that.

The exhibition opens at 4pm on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010, when you can enjoy an aperitvo and preview of the projects on display. The exhibition will remain open until Sunday September, 5th.

Opening Hours:
Thursday 2nd, September: 4-9pm
Friday 3rd/Saturday 4th, September: Noon-8pm
Sunday 5th, September: Noon-6pm

iRiS – Immediate Remote Interaction System from awiethoff on Vimeo.

By combining a recently developed mobile software application with the multimedia facade of the ARS Electronica building, the design team of iRiS intends to lower participation barriers for end users when interacting with such facades.

You can see the demo at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz on Sunday 5th & Monday 6th, September.

iRiS (Immediate Remote Interaction System) is a joint research project from the Univeristy of Saarbrücken, Germany and University of Munich, Germany. Alexander Wiethoff of LMU Medieninformatik used to be on the Faculty at CIID.

The team developed two prototypes: in the first application, users can paint interactively on the building using touch input on the mobile device. In a second application, users are able to solve a jigsaw puzzle displayed on the facade.

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.

This talk has been postponed until further notice.

The Art of Doing – A reflective investigation regarding group dynamics and how to get the project done.

Nicholas Wakeham (b.1975) is a creative producer, screenwriter and filmmaker. He has worked within the creative field for 13 years on both a national and international level. In his lecture The Art of Doing, Nicholas Wakeham shares his thoughts and ideas concerning project management, creating a team, group dynamics and how to work effectively but at the same time seeing the true process.

Educated at Malmö University, Stockholm Filmschool and Broby Grafiska. Nicholas Wakeham is currently a creative producer at www.varelsen.com in Malmö, Sweden.

where: The Auditorium, Strandboulevarden 47, Østerbro 2100
when: postponed until further notice

If you can’t find the room, please call Alie 20905005

Biography

where: The Auditorium, Strandboulevarden 47, Østerbro 2100
when: 5-6pm. Monday, August 2nd, 2010

If you can’t find the room, please call Alie 20905005

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

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

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

Sketching Metaphors of Interaction Design

Bill Verplank is an interaction design pioneer known for his sketches. He worked at Xerox, IDTwo, IDEO and Interval Research. He has taught at Stanford, MIT and Interaction-Ivrea.

where: Room A110, Strandboulevarden 47, Østerbro 2100
when: 4-5pm. Friday, July 2nd, 2010

If you can’t find the room, please call Alie 20905005

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