Shapers of Experience - Towards the Affect of Intimacy

Happylife

playstudies — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 10:10:29 +0000

Happylife is an electronic device that knows more about your partners state than you do. What would it mean if it could predict an incoming bout of misery through statistical analysis of accumulated data? When can technology become too invasive?

Lift France Conference

playstudies — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:43:49 +0000

Lift France 11 is a three-day conference about current and emerging use of digital technologies and their effects on innovation, societal and economic transformation. Under the slogan “Be Radical!”, Lift France will focus on disruption: when (high- or low-) tech contributes to redefining a market’s terms of reference, a whole industry, a share of social life, etc. Participants come to better understand the challenges and opportunities presented by digital technologies, to meet the people who drive these innovations, and to share their own insights.

Conference program

The conference program allows you to discover new and emerging technologies, see real life examples of implementations in different contexts, and expand your horizons by exploring ideas from other fields and backgrounds.

Wednesday July 6, 2011

13:00 First time participants welcome
14:00 Workshops
18:30 Welcome party & drinks

Thursday July 7, 2011

09:00 Welcome
09:30 Workshops
12:30 Lunch
14:00 Keynote: Saskia Sassen
14:30 URBAN – Who needs to become “smart” in tomorrow’s cities?
16:00 CARE – Disruptive innovation in healthcare and well-being
17:30 10 disruptive pitches, 6 mn each
19:30 Gala evening & networking

Friday July 8, 2011

09:00 Workshops + Learning session
11:30 Keynote: Geoff Mulgan, The Young Foundation
12:00 WORK/LEARN – Transforming the way we work, innovate… and learn
14:00 SLOW – Can we use technology to take back control over how we, and our organizations, manage time?
15:45 OPEN – What happens when barriers to innovation become drastically lower?
17:00 Lift France’s wrapup and takeaways
17:30 Closing of the conference: Roger Malina, Philippe Lemoine
20:00 Closing party

See the full program.

Via: lift

Sense-roid jacket will give you a hug

playstudies — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 23:24:48 +0000

Experts say that hugs are important in the development of the child if dispensed during the appropriate moments, and it could build up one’s confidence in the long run. Well, for those who grew up with a lack of hugs and realized through counselling sessions and self-reflection moments that this could be the reason you do have some social hang ups, or rather, causing you to behave the way you do to a certain extent, here is the Sense-Roid jacket that might give you more hugs than you bargained for. Sense-Roid inventors hope to see this unique jacket function as a form of therapy to those who are far away from you, or perhaps being stuck in a traffic jam that hardly moved for hours on end.

Video

More information at Kajimoto Laboratory.

via ubergizmo and via Akihabara News

Transform 2011

playstudies — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:09:37 +0000

Mayo Clinic Transform 2011

The leading health conference where design matters.

Mayo Clinic — the world’s largest and first integrated nonprofit medical practice — is pleased to once again host our Transform symposium on September 11-13, 2011 in Rochester, Minn

This premier multidisciplinary event focuses on innovations and designing solutions to transform the experience and delivery of health care. We expect the audience of approximately 1,000 attendees from around the world to participate in person — thousands more will engage online. There will be ample opportunities for networking and collaborations, numerous surprises, and incredible talks from world renowned experts in their field.

The audience will be a dynamic mix of innovators, leadership and decision makers from health care organizations, information technology, Web 2.0, policy makers, designers, and entrepreneurs across many fields that touch health care; and thought-provoking spaces that are not — but perhaps should be — part of the conversation.

The good life

playstudies — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 14:41:36 +0000

Artefact Design Director, August de los Reyes and user-researcher, Dave McColgin, contributed to the current issue of Arcade magazine, the magazine for architecture and design in the Northwest, released last week. Addressing the topic of the issue’s theme “The Good Life,” where Ray Gasetil challenges a range of designers, thinkers and activists to respond to this proposal: “To get to the sustainable future we want, we have to stop and remember that our goal can’t just be to live green, it also has to be to live well.”

Dave McColgin and August de los Reyes conducted interviews from two distinct perspectives on the same topic: one from Jessica Geenan, who works for Puget Sound Energy, and the other from Jenny Kam, a freelance designer whose master’s thesis focused on hedonism. They were both asked an identical set of questions to reveal the facets of the same topic from two independent points of view.

“We should be leading the way and designing with substance, starting by refining and updating our methods to adapt to our changing environment. Sustainability used to be an unquestioned and inherent part ofdesign, nothing like the recent wave of green veneers smacked onto products. We must design for context and consider the value of our work. Just because you can design something new doesn’t mean it’s an improvement, and designers need to be critical of such practices.” says Kam.

Understanding our perceptions of the good life contributes to Artefact’s on-going discussion of 21^st Century Design.

You can read the whole article here.

IDEO

playstudies — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 14:18:13 +0000

Design firm IDEO created a design concept for the future of self-service banking in hopes to put an end to robotic, inhuman experience of using a modern ATM. Starting from scratch, the company’s work has lead to a visually enhanced machine that is closer to human interaction.

via droga5x5

Natural user interfaces are all about alignment

playstudies — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 14:15:26 +0000

August de los Reyes, design director of Artefact Group (formerly of Microsoft Surface), was one of the speakers at MIX11, a Microsoft organised gathering of developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals “creating the most innovative and profitable consumer sites on the web”. In his excellent talk August wowed the audience with his talk on 21st Century Design and how the future thinking of design is changing. He advocates that natural user interfaces are all about alignment (rather than usability), and argues that we rethink the design process and focus on motivation, needs, positive emotion, learnability, adaptability, and revolutionary changes. This is in contrast to a [more conventional] user-centric design which puts faith in the users (who often don’t know what, why, and how they like something), and incremental design evolution.Watch video

(via designstores and UX Strategy)

Visual Hearing Aid

playstudies — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 20:55:48 +0000

Visual Hearing Aid combines the function of both the visual and hearing aid to display what other people are saying via two projectors to the user. The device uses speech to text translation software on embedded controllers to display the speech as text via two micro-projectors.

Design meets disability

playstudies — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:49:14 +0000

Pullin, G. (2009). Design meets disability. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Graham Pullin is a lecturer in Interactive Media Design at the University of Dundee. He has worked as a senior designer at IDEO, one of the world’s leading design consultancies, and at the Bath Institute of Medical Engineering, a prominent rehabilitation engineering center in the United Kingdom. He has received international design awards for design for disability and for mainstream products.

“There is huge potential for innovation in the daily lives of disabled people. Graham Pullin’s timely and inspiring book describes a wide range of design challenges; many of these sound niche at first – but have broad potential. What are needed are off-the-wall thinking, design craft, and engineering brilliance — plus disabled people as expert co-designers”. –John Thackara, Designer and author of ‘In the Bubble‘.

Don Norman also wrote a short review on the book:

A powerful, important book. Eyeglasses made the switch from shameful medical appliance, which is how the British National Health Service labeled them, to revered fashion item, so much so that people who didn’t need glasses would wear them anyway. If eyeglasses can do it, why not hearing aids, wheelchairs, or walkers? Change stigmas into desirables. Moreover, as the proponents of universal design have long proclaimed, meaningful design aids everyone.

Consider the visually impaired – which means you, yes you with the perfect eyesight. If you are in a really tedious, but important meeting, do you dare sneak a look at your wristwatch or phone? No: you have to look as if you are paying full attention. You are visually impaired. So why not a timepiece that gently vibrates the time to you? All of us have impairments at one time or another: why not design for them, helping both ourselves and those who have them permanently. But because we are all impaired one way or another. As we grow older, through both accident and age, all of us will accumulate changes in our abilities, so why not embrace the designs that help us? Make them fashion accessories, make them objects of pride.

This is a powerful book, for not only does it send a strong, welcome message, but it does so with elegance, complete with wonderful photographs aimed at stimulating the imagination and the creative mind. Not all the illustrations are about disabilities. Not all disabilities are disabilities.

Design Meets Disability on Amazon.com

Photosynthesis Car

playstudies — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 13:15:03 +0000

Photosynthesis Car is a revolutionary vehicle that integrates a special kind of solar panels, generating energy from the natural photosynthetic process. For the vehicle concept grows its own turf and plants that not only produces sustainable energy for the car but also seat passengers in a natural environment.