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…)
Symposium Advanced Automotive Design at the TU DelftLast Friday (Sept. 25th), I attended the Symposium Advanced Automotive Design organized at the TU Delft as part of the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Industrial Design Faculty. It was a very nice event in which top designers from the automotive industry (all of them TU Delft alumni) shared a bit of their work and experience as designers for these well known firms as well as giving us their view of the future of automotive design.
The keynote speakers were Fedde Talsma (Exterior Chief Designer at Volvo), Adrian van Hooydonk (Design Director at BMW) and Lowie Vermeersch (Design Director at Pininfarina) who were asked to choose a fragment of a movie as introduction to their talk. We also enjoyed shorter presentations by other TU Delft designers working for Ducati, Alfa-Romeo, DAF, Mercedes and Audi. (more…)
TEN: 10 years of Design & Emotion (Workshop Part I)The Design & Emotion Society is celebrating this year their 10th anniversary and they decided to organize an event at the Delft University of Technology to commemorate this milestone.
“TEN – 10 years of design and emotion” was a one day workshop held at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering on the 28th of August and luckily I was there to participate. In this post I’ll explain what the workshop was all about and I’ll give a brief explanation of what we did in the first half of the activity. In a later post, I’ll show some of the results that were obtained at the end of the day. (more…)
World Solar Challenge: TU Delft’s ‘Nuna’ to keep the winning streakThe 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!
Designing the new prEmo – An empirical research on how to improve the emotion measuring tool
A while back I was working together with Pieter Desmet, an associate professor at the Industrial Design faculty of the TU Delft, in a project aiming to improve prEmo, a tool to measure emotions towards products.
The tool proved to be very effective, but it still had some points to it that could be enhanced, so that’s why we started working on a newer version of it.
For anyone interested in this kind of studies, you can download a copy of the final document that I wrote reporting on the steps that were followed, the methodologies used, and of course the results from our study.
You can download a copy by clicking on the link below:
From A to Green – A future vision of sustainable coachworks
Relevant Keywords:
Automotive industry, sustainability, Transportation, Delivery, Coachworks, Future scenario
Design Goal:
Combigroep Carrosserieën, a Dutch coachworks producer, wants to extend its potential market following the newest regulations, transportation trends and logistics of the European Union having sustainability as a focus. As a group of 6 interdisciplinary designers the project was carried out from the strategy up to the product interaction and product detail level.
Project duration and team:
300 hours, 2 Strategic product designers (Stefanus Heru Prabowo, Ricardo Mejia), 3 Integral product designers (Barth Vrijling, Ana Laura Rodrigues Santos, Marjolein van Houten), 1 Interaction designer (David Güiza Caicedo).
Methods Used:
- Vision in Product Design (ViP) was used as a design framework throughout the whole project
- The context of the industry and our clients position within it was researched and analyzed through stakeholder analysis, competitor analysis and PESTE analysis
- Interviews and role playing user analysis were used to understand our users and personas were used to illustrate them during the design process.
- Generated future scenarios
- Creative sessions were performed to generate ideas during the design process.
Hema themed Internet Explorer
As part of a visual design exercise at the TU Delft, we were given the following assignment:
“Hema has signed a contract with Microsoft and will be the first to launch its Hema own brand Internet browser onto the market. The browser will be an Hema version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. The contract does not allow Hema to make any modifications to the technology used or the functions provided by the browser. By enforcing these restrictions, Microsoft wants to ensure that consumers are aware that they are using a Microsoft product. As Hema does not specialise in software, it has no objections to the restrictions. The company sees no future in software that has been developed by a warehouse. On the other hand, the company has years of experience successfully marketing well-known products under Hema’s own label.
Assignment A: Design the graphical user interface (GUI) for the Hema browser, based on the functions provided by Internet Explorer 6. Do not waste time altering any of these functions! (more…)
VirtualGoals: enhancing the playability of football through the use of interactive technologies
Relevant Keywords:
Football, interactive technology, prototyping, user testing, wizard of oz.
Design Goal:
At playgrounds, the sport courts are very popular and are used intensively for playing football. It is however strange that these sport courts are hardly used by girls, despite the strong growth in the popularity of girl football in the last few years. Our design goal was to develop an interactive installation for sport courts and in particular the Cruyff courts. By adding interactive technology to the game of football we want to enhance the playability of the playgrounds.
Project duration and team:
120 hours, 3 interaction designers (David Güiza Caicedo, Nouschka Tijdeman, Ferdinand van Oostrom)
Methods used:
- Experiential prototyping
- Wizard of Oz prototyping
- Mid-Fi prototyping
- User testing
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
I'm an industrial designer with a focus on people-product interaction... just trying to share some of the things I know about (and those I would like to know more about).
This website works both as a blog to share my experience with some design methodologies / tools, and as a showcase for some of the projects I've worked on.
You can see an overview of my design portfolio by clicking the link underneath.
...And yes, I actually used to have blue hair ;-)
