Why does Apple think that a stylus is a design flaw?
“It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it.”
Steven P. Jobs – CEO, Apple Inc.
I wonder why is it that Apple considers the use of a stylus as a design flaw?
I understand where Steve is coming from and as an interaction designer I agree that a touch interface should NOT depend on the accuracy offered by a stylus to be usable, but c’mon! (more…)
What are tangible user interfaces?During the last few days, I’ve been doing a lot of internet surfing at the office in search for good examples of trends in user interface (UI) design for one of our award winning 360 Trend Reports.
On it’s on, that is already quite a daunting task, as there are so many things out there that it’s difficult to pick and filter everything out. To top it off, there seem to be a lot of overlapping terms to define different types of interfaces which doesn’t make it any easier when you try to organize and classify them.
But anyway, going straight to the point, one of the most interesting user interface paradigms I’ve come across not only during my search but also during my studies, is the Tangible User Interface (TUI), so I decided to dedicate this post to explaining what they are and to show a few great examples of (soon to be) products which make use of this type of interaction.
To start up, here’s my definition:
A tangible user interface is one in which the user interacts with a digital system through the manipulation of physical objects linked to and directly representing a quality of said system.
The idea with TUIs is to have a direct link between the system and the way you control it through physical manipulations by having an underlying meaning or direct relationship which connects the physical manipulations to the behaviours which they trigger on the system. (more…)
RepRap: Be fruitful and multiply!
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”
Genesis 1:28
I’m not a religious person at all, but this quote from Genesis illustrates very nicely the awesome powers that were bestowed by “the dude upstairs” upon that couple of naked people living in his garden: Usefulness and Self reproduction!
This gave way to the opportunity to get more of these naked people to walk around, do some cool things which could help themselves and others and eventually create some more naked people of their own to keep the ball rolling.
Well this amazing power is exactly what the guys behind the RepRap project gave to their open source rapid prototyping machine. That’s right, it’s a SELF REPLICATING RAPID PROTOTYPING MACHINE! it creates useful things for us and has the ability to create a copy of itself so that others can take advantage of it too. How awesome is that?? (more…)
New year, new decade, new job, new city… and I get to play with robots!
It’s being a pretty hectic end/start of the year. As of last Monday (11th of January) I started working as Interaction Designer at VanBerlo Studios, the biggest design studio in the Netherlands and an important player in the European scene of product development.
As a consequence and after 9 years of my life spent in the little and picturesque town of Delft I had to move to Eindhoven, a bigger city down to the south of the Netherlands, very well known for being the headquarters of technology giants Philips and home of former European champions PSV Eindhoven (I guess I can never wear my Ajax jersey in public around this town).
The city is not as charming, but the work and the company is absolutely fantastic so far… and I get to play with robots! One of the first projects I’ll be working on deals with robotics and therefore today I paid a visit to the mechanical engineering department of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). (more…)
Sustainable packaging? Bring out the popcorn!
Another way of 'recycling' packing peanuts?
For my first post of the year I received the inspiration from a Christmas present my sister received while I was visiting her.
I’ve always had the habit of keeping the little styrofoam packing peanuts of any package I receive so that I can reuse them whenever I have to send something out myself. It saves me money and I ensure that the material is used at least once more. Sadly though, I’m sure that this is not something that everybody does and undoubtedly most of these peanuts end up in the trash after a single use, contributing to our waste problems.
But what’s the alternative? Well, as I mentioned, my sister received this gift during the holidays which I thought was brilliantly simple and a very nicely thought alternative. It was a little box with shower and bath soaps which used POPCORN (!!!) instead of styrofoam. (more…)
I’ve still got it a bit :-D
I recently discovered the newest version of Sketchbook Pro (2010) and I have to say “oh my freaking god! this is the coolest sketching program ever!”. I absolutely LOVE the simplicity and elegance of the software’s interface and I’m also very grateful that they follow the KISS principle very nicely (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) without cluttering the program with a whole bunch of tools and features that you seldom use.
Just for kicks I made a few sketches to add to my portfolio (pretty sketches sell VERY well on an industrial design portfolio, even if that’s not what you want to focus on) and I was very positively surprised that I still have it a little bit in me to come up with decent results. So here are a few underneath… What do you think? would you hire me??? 
(more…)
5 principles of service design thinking
I’ve been in contact with Marc Stickdorn ever since my MSc. graduation project, as he is an expert in service design. Well he is now working on a new book project along with some of his colleagues in which they will deal with basics, tools and service design cases.
The interesting part of it is that the project is getting the service design community involved as co-authors of the book so to speak, and as such the book is meant to be a reflection of what “the scene” thinks.
In order to get some feedback on the first sneak preview of a few pages from the introduction of the book called “5 principles of service design thinking“, we at SusaGroup worked together with Marc and his colleagues in arranging a special Panoremo setup which could be used by service designers to give their feedback on the content and the layout of the upcoming book’s sneak preview pages.
If service design thinking is your thing, I suggest you drop by at www.susagroup.com/marcstickdorn to give Marc your own feedback. (more…)
TEN: 10 years of Design & Emotion (Workshop Part II)
A while back I wrote about the workshop organized by the Design & Emotion Society to celebrate their ten year anniversary, and I said I would make a second post explaining the rest of the workshop and the results… well, after finally making some time to sit down and go through it, here it is!
If you haven’t read the first part, I suggest you do so here, because that will make the coming lines much more clear to understand.
so, here it goes…. (more…)
Craddle to Craddle: Hype or hope?
I’ve been meaning to make a post about Craddle to Craddle (C2C) for a while and last week we had a mini-symposium about it at the TU Delft with the attendance of Michael Braungart, one of the original C2C advocates, so I figured that this was the perfect excuse to get down to it.
So, to get started, let’s explain the C2C concept a little bit, and the best way to explain Cradle to Cradle is to first explain what Cradle to Grave means.
Until not so long ago, our production paradigm was focused on manufacturing products as cheaply as possible which would be later discarded into landfills (in the worst case) or burned up for energy (in the best case), meaning that we were producing or processing materials (cradle) which would later be rendered useless because they were being buried or destroyed (grave) (more…)
Creative Sessions: Playing with serious stuff
A creative session is a gathering of people who, following some steps and rules shaped by a facilitator (or organizer), let their creativity loose. Working together, in one or more teams, they eventually generate ideas for the subject matter in question. The session doesn’t need to have very strict guidelines in order to work. As long as it is well organized most likely creativity and inspiration sooner or later emerge (Grudin & Pruitt, 2004).
I have participated in a couple of creative sessions and always found them extremely useful as a means to let your mind go free and be creative in solving problems or in generating ideas and so I wanted to share with you the process that I followed while organizing one such activity during my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project in which we were dealing with emotions in hotel environments. (more…)
And just to get you a bit exciTED…TEDx Amsterdam… in Delft!
Next Friday (20th of November) a conference called TEDxAmsterdam will take place in… well, in Amsterdam (duh!)
TED as some of you may know, is a very famous yearly conference held in California, which brings together top people from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment & Design. Their TEDtalks are AMAZING to say the least and I’ve featured a few here before (I promise a post in the not so far future with a collection of my very favourites). They are trully Ideas Worth Spreading as their motto goes.
So anyways… TEDx is an initiative of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience and of course, we couldn’t be left outside of the big party here in the Netherlands.
At the TEDxAmsterdam event, TEDtalks videos and live speakers will be combined to spark deep discussions and connections from the local and world communities.
Unfortunately enough, TEDxAmsterdam is an invitation only event so not everybody can attend (yours truly included), but in the true spirit of the original TED (Ideas worth spreading, right???) a live video stream will be sent to various cities in the Netherlands where people can gather to see them in high quality video (a so called simulcast)… and waddaya know??? I’ve taken it upon myself (more…)
Differentiating emotional hotel experiences (EuroCHRIE 2009)
I’m finally back home after attending the EuroCHRIE 2009 conference in Helsinki for a few days, and I have to say that it was quite an interesting experience for me, since it was not really in my professional field as a designer, but it did have to do with what I’ve been working on for the past few months first as part of my MSc. graduation project and now as an interaction designer/researcher for SusaGroup.
The conference dealt with experiences in the hospitality and tourism industry and I was actually there presenting a working paper which came from a small exploratory study I conducted at the early stages of my graduation project with the aim to identify what type of emotions people felt the most in a hotel environment and towards what exactly. (more…)
God! you gotta love Delft
There’s a reason why Delft is ranked as the 15th best engineering university in the world, and god, you gotta love them for that!
In Australia, only a crash 3 weeks before the start of the race managed to keep Nuna 5 from being the top dog of the World Solar Challenge so far… After a speedy crash recovery operation, we’re still third by the second day of racing and breathing down the neck of second placed University of Michigan. But watch out Tokai University (leaders so far) ’cause the Nuna team went to Australia to claim their rightful place and beat the competition for the 5th time in a row.
[UPDATE: As of October 27th, Nuna 5 has already surpassed the car from the University of Michigan, so Tokai is next!]
And back in Delft, the Design and Engineering Award is underway with some very, VERY interesting stuff going on.
On this post, you can find a couple of my favourite videos of some of the participating projects from our different faculties, which are just to show off a bit of why Delft is soooo cool 
(more…)
Panoremo: A tool to assess the emotional experience of environments
Relevant Keywords:
Evaluating emotions, environments, services, consumer experience, online application, prototyping
Design Goal:
During my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project a concept was developed that was deemed very interesting and promising for the potential assessment of emotions experienced towards a physical environment. This concept was later developed even further in collaboration with SusaGroup in order to bring it into the market as a fully functional instrument that can aid in emotional design research.
Methods Used:
- Early prototyping to perform user testing of working principle.
- Software development.
- Usability testing.
We are a group of industrial designers with a focus on strategy and interaction in product design, and this blog is our place to try and share some of the things we know about and discuss those we would like to know more about.
This website works as a platform to share our experience with some design methodologies & tools, to discuss design related issues and to showcase some of the projects we've worked on.
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