Sometimes the first year students surperize you with what they can do in their very first year. Pim Vellenga, Hessel Sieswerda and Niels Timessen challenged themselves with “one huge problem: how do you get the interactive onscreen user interface out of instant messaging experience.” They designed a tea box that is integrated with messaging abilities for the elderly to communicate with their grandchildren. Read the report [PDF, 2M] for more.
B22 Project by Jaap Norbruis. [PDF Report, 1.5M]
“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.”
by Sophie van der Weerd, [PDF | 2M]
In her B22 project report, Sophie writes: “…I will offer the ‘WeTouch Pillow’; the pillow that communicates your families’ presence in a subtle way without an obliged effort. If one uses his pillow, the pillow of the other becomes warmer and vice versa. I will focus upon the communication tools market. The market will have a need for my product, since it communicates family presence without an obligation and current communication tools require an obligation and effort, which people do not like when communicating with their family like having to call, as to my user research. I want to express to the market the importance of family presence and contact, but that there is no obliged effort needed. The internet will be a good medium to use to contact the target group of relatives living apart, since the younger generations uses it a lot. And I try to reach people who live apart from each other, so an internet service which sends one pillow to each of the relatives is a good way to sell the WeTouch Pillow. Also because an internet connection is needed for the pillows to connect…”
by Meerthe Heuvelings. [PDF, 2.3M]
“In the ‘Contextual Information Exchange’ project, the focus was on communicating the context of one user to another user. In this project I focused on creating a feeling of connectedness over distance. To create this feeling of connectedness, I did research to the missing-links between face-to-face and distant communication and concluded that virtual shadows of real physical objects or people can create a feeling of physical presence on ‘the other side’.
In this project we worked in three iterations, the last two iterations were done individually. In the second iteration I developed a concept in which the shadows of stones can form a new medium of communication over distance. The stones on one side are transfered into shadows on the other side and vice versa. This will create a decorative piece of stones and shadows, that is made with use of two persons that live on a distance from each other.
The final concept is the ‘Movow’, which stands for ‘Moving Shadow’. In this concept the amount of people and the speed with which these people move are detected in one room, and transfered into shadows of the ‘Movow’ light object in another room. The ‘Movow’ is able to generate shadows according to the amount of people and movement. When there are not that much people in the other room, only the lower ring of the prototype will be lit. When the amount of people increases, the light will ‘grow’ to the ceiling. The speed with which the lights will be circulate in the rings, depends on the movement of the people in the other room. For this concept a prototype is build that represents the light and shadow capabilities of the concept.”
B22 Project by Yi Xue. [PDF Report, 3M]
“The number around the clock will change according to the social status of other’s. The size of the number and the distance to the clock are proportional. Larger the size, longer the distance stands for socialing and vice versa. The color in the middle will show dynamic situation of social environment.”
A nice project done by MieKe Kleppe. “The goal of my IBP is to design a system or device that will help expats to feel more at home abroad. I used literature, interviews, surveys and a context mapping session to find out that the real problem is that they feel far away from the people that really know them. After some more research and idea generation I refined my direction in designing a system or device that will motivate friends of the expat to share their daily life with the expat with use of text messages. So I chose to design something for the friends, not the expats themselves. The biggest challenge for this project was to make sending the messages as little effort for the friend as possible, but still keep it interesting for the expat.
The result of my project is a pendant that can be hung on the phone of the friend. With a simple sliding movement a message is send to his expat friend. Context awareness phones are used to determine what the friend is doing and which message should be send.”
Download the report [PDF, 800K] for details.