Posts tagged as ‘Research’

Friday, October 24th, 2008

PrEmo: a tool to measure emotional responses

PrEmo is a tool to measure emotional responses towards products, originally developed by Pieter Desmet at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft. It uses animated characters to portray a certain number of emotions, which a person can use to describe in a non verbal way the kind of emotions that he feels towards a product.

I had the chance to work in a research project in the past in which I compared this tool to a more semantic tool (the Geneva Emotions Wheel) which gave us some very good insights into how this tool could be enhanced. Together with Pieter Desmet, it was decided that a follow up project was needed in order to make a newer version of the tool with the findings of the first study as a basis.

I you are interested in helping out with this study, please visit www.bluehaired.com/premo and fillin our questionnaire. Here you willbe able to see the evolution of the original tool and give us some feedback about it.

And of course, if you are interested in the results or the study in general, you can always drop me a line and I’ll be happy to give you more information.

TAGS: Cartoons, Design for Emotions, Evaluating emotions, Research

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

EVOthing about interaction design

I helped Evi to make a few minor adjustments to her site recently, and with a tweak here and there, I have to say that it really looks fantastic! This is trully one of my favourite websites. A very nice and clean design: Simple, beautiful, elegant and playful at the same time.

The website, of course, is Evi Malisianou’s portfolio site, an interaction designer from the TU Delft with a background in interior architecture and product design. On it, you will find a bunch of her very inspiring projects (would love to have a few of those on my own portfolio), along with pictures, videos and detailed reports of her work.

If you are into quality interaction design (with a strong background of user centered research), you should definitely take a look at her website: www.EVOthing.com

TAGS: Athens, Context Mapping, Greece, Research, User Experience

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

PALS & Tokens: Conceptual design for books and libraries of the future

Relevant Keywords:

Reading, books, future scenario, conceptual design, context research

Design Goal:

As part of a design exercise at the TU Delft we were asked to research the domain of books and libraries and to propose a concept design of how these would be like in a future scenario. The focus was laid on the concept and interactions rather than on technical details of the products.

Project duration and team:

75 hours, 3 interaction designers (David Güiza Caicedo, Job Greefhorst, Amine Rhord)

Methods Used:

Vision in Product Design (ViP) was used as a design framework throughout the whole project

Cultural probes

Creative session

Presentation videos

(more…)

TAGS: Context Mapping, Creative Sessions, Innovation, Portfolio David, Product Analysis, Research, TU Delft, User Experience, User Interfaces, User Research, Videos, Vision in Product Design

Friday, January 25th, 2008

Beerbuddies: Using the personality of cartoon characters to define people’s personalities

As a part of my Design for Interaction Master’s degree, I took part of a project called Exploring Interactions, for which I was trying to empower bartenders against unwanted behaviour in their bars.

As a field research, I organized some group interviews with local bartenders and made use of some generative methods (such as collage making) in order to gain more information regarding their context and the interactions involved in their job, specially those regarding the customers and more specifically those involving customers showing some sort of unwanted behaviour. After thorough analysis and fiddling with different ideas, the Beerbuddies were born.

The BeerBuddies are meant as a tool to reflect the personality and mood of bar-goers through the use of beer coasters with cartoon characters on them. (more…)

TAGS: Cartoons, Context Mapping, Fun, Generative Tools, Personas, Research

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Context mapping: A look at the advantages of applying generative tools “in situ”

Generative tools are an excellent means of acquiring information from your users, but it is sometimes
difficult for the participants of your research to get started with them. And although using sensitizing
techniques such as workbooks or disposable cameras are great ways of introducing your participants into the subject at hand, when there is a restriction in time these are not easy or desirable to apply.
In these cases a good way of getting the participants more involved into the subject is by conducting group sessions in the location where the actions are supposed to take place. The surrounding space and objects can trigger the memory of the participants more easily than if they are interviewed in a neutral location, and they get the opportunity to better illustrate their points by re-enacting certain actions in the right place. In situ sessions also have a positive effect in the quality of the (more…)

TAGS: Context Mapping, Generative Tools, Papers, Research

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

BeerBuddies: Empowering bartenders against unwanted behaviour

Relevant Keywords:

Work, Leisure, Horeca (Hotels, restaurants, cafes), interaction, evident, explorative, involved, dominant, submissive

Design Goal:

To empower bartenders against unwanted behavior. The project was performed for the “Exploring Interactions” course, as part of the Design for Interaction Master of Science at the Delft University of Technology.

Project duration:

225 hours

Methods Used:

Context mapping research through group interviews and generative methods (such as collage making) with local bartenders to gain rich visual and contextual information from them (field research).

Online survey to assess how people perceive the personalities of cartoon characters in terms of dominance and friendliness.

(more…)

TAGS: Cartoons, Context Mapping, Papers, Personas, Portfolio David, Research, TU Delft

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

Assesment of existing tools for the measurement of emotions and their application in consumer products research

A while back, and as part of my bachelor for Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft, we performed a research project in which we took a deeper look into the world of measuring emotional responses, and reported our proceedings and findings in a scientific paper. We also performed a field test with two of the most promising tools that we identified in order to have a better understanding of how they work and how they could be improved. These tools are PrEmo (developed at the TU Delft) and the Geneva Emotions Wheel (developed by the Geneva Emotion Research Group)

If you are interested in this field I highly recommend you take a look at it.

Here’s the abstract:

“This paper introduces the subject of emotions in consumer products research; what are they, how to define them and most importantly, how to quantify and qualify them. A brief background research is made to clarify the concepts involved and to identify existing tools to measure emotions. Furthermore, a small field research was performed to test the validity that two of the most promising tools have on the field of consumer products research.”

To download a PDF version of the study’s report or the poster, click in the links bellow.

LINK 1: Assessment of existing tools for the measurement of emotions (PDF)

LINK 2: Poster (PDF)

TAGS: Cartoons, Design for Emotions, Papers, Research