Posts tagged as ‘Innovation’
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
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…)
TAGS: Fun, Innovation, TU Eindhoven, User Interfaces, Videos
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
TAGS: Delft, Fun, Innovation, Lectures, TU Delft
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
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…)
TAGS: Delft, Fun, Innovation, Lectures, TU Delft
Tuesday, October 27th, 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…)
TAGS: Design for Emotions, Evaluating emotions, Innovation, Lectures, Papers, Research, Services, TU Delft, User Experience, User Research
Monday, October 26th, 2009
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…)
TAGS: Delft, Found on the net, Fun, Innovation, Prototyping, Research, Sustainability, TU Delft, Videos
Friday, September 11th, 2009
The World Solar Challenge is a renowned solar-powered car race run every 2 years since 1987 through the Australian outback with participants from all over the world. The TU Delft has been participating and winning every single event (kicking ass I may add) since 2001 with their car, Nuna.
This coming October the prestigious race will be ran again and this year’s team from the TU has a big responsibility on their shoulders to try and win their 5th consecutive event. The team is already in Australia preparing for the big event and in the mean time I wanted to post a collection of cool videos from this years Nuna 5.
Good luck to them, and I hope that they bring a new title back home!
TAGS: Found on the net, Innovation, Mobility, Sustainability, TU Delft, Videos
Friday, September 4th, 2009
Relevant Keywords:
MSc. Graduation project, evaluating emotions, services, consumer experience, hotels, mobile application, prototyping
Design Goal:
Various methods are available for measuring emotional responses elicited by products (design) or human-product interaction. Up to this point however, no instrument was available that could be used to assess emotional service experiences. The aim of the project was to extend the possibilities of assessing emotions to the realm of experiential service design. As a case study for the project, the focus was laid on the `hotel experience’, that is, the experience of a guest while staying at a hotel.
Project duration:
5 months (full time)
Methods Used:
- Thorough literature research to become acquainted with the project domain.
- Online survey to identify the most common types of emotions experienced by hotel guests and the stimuli associated with these experiences.
- Creative session organized with a panel of users and designers to generate ideas.
- Early prototyping to perform user testing of concepts.
- Creation of wire-frames and navigation flow-charts to define the software’s architecture.
- Hi-Fi prototyping of final concept.
- Usability testing.
(more…)
TAGS: Cartoons, Delft, Evaluating emotions, Innovation, Papers, Portfolio, Prototyping, Research, Services, User Experience, User Interfaces, User Research, Videos
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
So… it’s been a little over a week since I did the presentation for my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project (Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services), and since I went off on a short one week vacation right after that, I didn’t have the time to post the video and some photos of the presentation during that time.
But as I promised some people, today I finally got back and had some spare time to upload everything. So above,you can take a look at the video of the presentation (takes about 45 minutes including the questions round). The file is quite big (around 500 Mb) because I couldn’t (more…)
TAGS: Cartoons, Delft, Design for Emotions, Evaluating emotions, Innovation, Lectures, Photos, Prototyping, Research, Services, User Experience, User Interfaces, Videos
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
Hi everyone!
well, it’s almost here… on the 26th of June I will be giving the presentation for my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project and I’d like to invite anyone interested in the subject to come along to the presentation.
It will be held at 3:45 pm at the faculty of Mechanical, Maritime & Materials Engineering (Mekelweg 2, 2628 CD Delft) of the TU Delft, in Room F.
In the mean time, wish me luck finishing up the project!
TAGS: Delft, Design for Emotions, Innovation, Lectures, Prototyping, Research, User Experience, User Interfaces
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
Last Thursday I finally received the green light from my graduation supervisory team, which in fact means that they are confident that I will be able to finish up my MSc. graduation project within the coming 6 weeks and that no matter what, on the 26th of June somewhere in the afternoon, I will finally be leaving my eternal student status behind to officially adopt my new role as a jobless professional with a Master’s degree (albeit, hopefully for not too long).
So anyway, if there are people out there in the Netherlands (or the vicinity) who are interested in the project (“Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services”), I will be performing a public presentation of the project on the 26th of June, at the Delft Univeristy of Technology. More details regarding location and time will come shortly.
TAGS: Delft, Design for Emotions, Europe, Innovation, Lectures, Research, Services, User Experience, User Interfaces
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
I’ve been quite busy the last few weeks working on my MSc. graduation project, and so I haven’t had much time to do any new updates here, but since a while ago I found out that one of the projects I worked on had been published on the website of the European Commission for Transport, I figured that was worth a mention.
As I’ve showed in previous posts, I worked together with a group of colleagues in a project developing a new concept for delivery trucks of the future. My posts were focusing mainly on the application of the Vision in Product Design approach (ViP), which was just but a part of the project.
Later in the process, this vision and future product which we had designed was translated into a product that could be introduced to the market in the near future and it had a strong relation to the Civitas initiative sponsored by the European Union (more…)
TAGS: Europe, Innovation, Mobility, Papers, Research, Sustainability, Videos, Vision in Product Design
Saturday, March 21st, 2009
Here’s the sixth and final post of the ongoing series explaining the Vision in Product Design (ViP) process. It includes some very nice illustrations of the delivery truck we designed for the future.
PART 6:
DESIGNING - THE PRODUCT LEVEL
Once you reach the product level once again, you use the information from all the previous phases of ViP, specially the vision which you created, and the interaction qualities you intend to have with your product, and you finally start designing the product (or service) itself.
This is probably the phase of the process which will be closest to home to designers, as here’s where you start giving shape to the cloud of ideas that have been generated so far, and you finally (more…)
TAGS: Innovation, Sketching, Vision in Product Design
Sunday, March 15th, 2009
I’ve already made a post before talking about the Personal Area Libraries, one of our concepts in our attempt to design the books and libraries of the future. Today it’s time to show our second concept, the Tokens. You can see the results of our initial research by visiting the previous post so that you can understand why we came up with this concept, but in the mean time and just to give you an idea, here’s the vision we developed as a starting point:
“In a world full of volatile digital media, people feel distant and unconnected from their reading material. It’s so easy to copy and distribute media that its very possession has lost its value.
We want to bring this value back to the people.”
So here it goes:
THE READING MATERIAL:
The reading material is independent of the eReader itself. It is carried individually (more…)
TAGS: Context Mapping, Innovation, Research, User Experience, User Interfaces, Videos
Friday, March 6th, 2009
As part of a project for the TU Delft and together with my good friends Job Greefhorst and Amine Rhord, we set out to design the books and libraries of the future. We followed some context mapping techniques to understand the domain of reading in general as a first step for our process. I will explain the process in a later post, as it was quite interesting and it will give me a chance to explain some of these context mapping techniques in greater detail, but in the mean time, I’ll just stick to the results of our research which are more than plenty for a single post, and of course I will show you one of the two concepts that we came up with (the other one will also come on a later post).
So let’s get started…
THE READING DOMAIN CONTEXT
We wanted to know what people thought of their books, how they stored them, why they liked them, why they (more…)
TAGS: Context Mapping, Innovation, Product Analysis, Research, User Experience, User Interfaces, Videos
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
With my MSc. graduation project now in full swing, I havent had much time to dedicate to posting things, but I figured that this could be a nice way of clearing my mind, so today I’ll continue with the ongoing series of posts explaining the Vision in Product Design (ViP) process.
PART 5:
DESIGNING - THE INTERACTION LEVEL
By following the ViP methodology, the next step in our process was to think about the interaction level in the future context. In this new step the idea is to identify a number of interaction qualities which are relevant in our attempt to achieve the vision that we conceived in the previous phase, but without thinking of any particular product yet.
These qualities of interaction will be of great importance for the (more…)
TAGS: Innovation, Vision in Product Design
