Ash at CIID

A new presentation from Dan Saffer’s Kicker Studio. I always like Dan’s practical, no-nonsense advice on just getting the job done right. And this one is one of the best. I look forward to applying these ideas and rules-of-thumb in my practical work.

CIID Mircosites - Browse CIID projects by module or student in:

- Tangible User Interface
- Toy View
- Crafting Interactive Spaces
- Interactive Data Visualization
- Graphical User Interface
- User Research
- Interaction Design Theory
- Physical computing
- Video Prototyping
- Computational Design

Phew!

I posted a short note on our recent project in Tangible User Interfaces where we decided to work on wearables for firefighters. Here are some photos of initial sketches and prototypes. More about the actual features of the glove in posts ahead.

Rapidly created scenarios helped us better understand how technology-enhanced gloves could answer critical needs of firefighters in real fire situations.

Because we were working with a set of four or five critical user needs (finalized from researching papers and ongoing projects in wearables for firefighting), the first concept of our product became loaded with features – a classic case of ‘featuritis’.

An all-inclusive first version of the glove.

Exploring possibilites and uses of gesture recognition in the gloves.

Constant visual and verbal feedback from teachers helped iterate issues around form, function, interaction, physical limitations and user interface.

In feedback sessions from teachers - drawing by Alex Wiethoff.

In feedback sessions from teachers - drawing by Christopher Scales.

Bend sensors came up as a great option for adding gestural recognition possibilities in a prototype.

Soon we made the leap to testing and working with an actual prototypical glove.

Experimenting with a real glove helped explore issues of viability of gestures, user interface details, etc.

Bill Verplank drew for us his comprehensive yet concise model of what constitutes the process of design, in his Open Lecture at CIID a few weeks ago. This is very comprehensive and scalable model for approaching just about the entire spectrum of interaction design challenges in particular.

Beginning with the ‘motivations’ for design, the model traces progressive development into creating ‘meanings’ for human beings via metaphors, on to defining the ‘modes’ of system behavior, and finally, making effective ‘mappings’ to the artifacts and controls that ultimately become tools of usage.

Amazing stuff!

A few weeks later, we had another model of the design process up on the wall – this time from Niels-Clausten Stuck. (Drawing from my notebook below). This model is comparatively much more generic than the earlier one, in that sense that it describes an effective approach to challenges across the design spectrum, from interaction and innovation to spaces, physical products and information.

Niels traced the development of ‘user research data’ into informed ‘insights’, which in turn could be abstracted further to the level of ‘frameworks’ that define the opportunity/solution space for design. The dominant opportunities are then concretized into real-world solutions by developing a multitude of ‘concepts’, out of which are created select final ‘prototypes’ – the design solutions that live and perform in the hands of users.

This (second) model of the design process is also a great approach to looking at the focus areas and work of various types of global design/strategy/innovation consultancies – we CIID are learning from folks specializing in each or many of the different areas of the model. Yes, if I haven’t said it already – its great to be here!