Author: hj

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Centralized versus Decentralized: A Study on Tangible Control over Devices in the Living Room

By Matthijs Kwak

Interesting work done by one of the master students. [Project Report, PDF, 700K]

SCD2, Decentralized.
SCD1, centralized.

Abstract: Technology is moving to the background and interoperability between devices increases. The handles for users to explore, make and break connections between devices seem to disappear inoverly complex menu structures displayed on small screens. Two prototypes have been developed that introduce a tangible approach towards exploring, making and breaking connections between devices in the living room. One provides a centralized approach (SCD1), the other a decentralized approach (SCD2). Industrial Design students and graduates(N=12) have performed tasks and were asked to explain and grade one out of three methods: SCD1 (image 1), SCD2 (image 2) and bluetooth pairing.Findings suggest that users are better able to project their mental model of how the system works on SCD2 and that atangible solution is not necessarily a better one.

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Farm Ville: Contextual Information Exchange

B22 Project by Jaap Norbruis. [PDF Report, 1.5M]

Farm Ville
Farm Ville

“Within this project I explored how context is experienced and in what ways it can be captured and communicated. The design goal of this project is to design a system that communicates contextual information seamless across realities, the context of a remote user should be communicated to a receiving person is such a way that he or she is able to experience it.”

 

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Share your context

Hugo Christiaans, one of my students, has done an excellent project, namely Share Your Context, about contextual information exchange.

[PDF, 2M] Share your context

Summary of the report:

Share your context

Non face‐to‐face communication of social and emotional experiences between people happens nowadays through phone or other media like email, IM (Instant Message), webcam and other virtual communities such as Second Life. Share experiences, express creativity and maintain easily contacts have made these virtual worlds very popular for millions of Internet users. To support the communication in these worlds emoticons are often used. This form of context is a combination of different states (physical, information, social and emotional), which help the receivers too understand the received information right.

Continue reading Share your context

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Visit Jiangnan University

From June 6 to 9, prof. Matthias Rauterberg and I were invited to the School of Design,  Jiangnan University in Wuxi, China. In these 3 days, we presented our education system and our research projects to the teachers and students, had several discussions about possible cooperations in both education and research, and organized a one day workshop “discrete interaction design” for 30 students. The students were very much interested in the topics we presented, especially the interactive way of presenting them. It was a successful and fruitful visit. We definitely look forward to the cooperations.

News about our visit on the website of Jiangnan University:

[nggallery id=5]

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Light and the perception of cleanliness in the metro environment

M12 Research Project by Niels Molenaar. Report: [PDF, 400K]

Metro Environment

In public spaces to improve the public perception of cleanliness different lighting conditions can be utilized to dim or to light the littered areas. One would suggest to dim the light for the littered area, or the other way around, to improve the perceived cleanliness. It is however not clear how the lighting condition in the littered area would influence the perceived cleanliness. In this paper we report the result from an experiment in which a metro environment is set up to observe how people react to darkened and lightened litter. The result is somewhat supersizing. People perceive an environment as cleaner when attention is drawn to litter by focusing light on it. The causes of this observation are discussed.

N. Molenaar, Light and the perception of cleanliness in the metro environment, M12 Project Report, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 2010.
FULLTEXT: PDF
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Distributed Creative Dance

Dance, robot!
Dance, robot!

Yesterday I managed a one-day workshop on dichotomies in designing distributed systems, for 25 master students in the class “Designing for Systems”. The dichotomies addressed were standalone/distributed, centralized control/decentralized control, and process-/product-oriented design, as well as a hidden agenda for the conflicts between standards and implementations. In this workshop I wanted the student to “experience” the dichotomies Instead of me telling the story.

Two types of distributed systems were focused on, client/server and peer to peer. Students were divided into four groups, one working on C/S, two on P2P and another on standardization of data and communication. They are briefed and quickly pushed into hands-on work to make a few AdMoVeo robots to dance together, in a distributed setting.

The workshop worked out quite well in terms of its designed goals, and actually it was beyond my expectations – I did not expect that robots would really dance together, but at the end of the day, all the teams managed to show something, at least partially working. One of the other things surprised me was the difficulties they had in creating and parsing XML documents, which was suggested for saving time from standardizing the data and message formats. I could have made some partially working code snippets to reduce the load.

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Semantic Connections Demonstrator

Semantic Connections

For the EU project SOFIA (Smart Objects For Intelligent Applications), Bram van der Vlist and Gerrit Niezen created a demonstrator for one of the use cases: semantic connections. “The demonstrator consists of a set of devices; surround sound-set, mobile mp3 players, an ambient lighting system and interaction device(s). The interaction device is a tile-like interactive object that allows for both exploration of the Smart Space in terms of connections and manipulation of these connections and information/data streams. Coloured LED lighting and light dynamics visualize the connections and connection possibilities between the various devices. By means of putting devices close to one of the four sides of the tile, a user can check if there is a connection and if not if a connection is possible. By simply picking up the tile, and shaking it a user can make or break the connection between the devices present at the interaction tile.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdZcjqfq8RQ