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…)
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.
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.
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…)
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!
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.
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…)
Some one sent me a link to this very beautiful short movie, which shows some awesome holographic interfaces, and I just had to share it here. Not much more to say, but WATCH IT! it will certainly be worth the 9 minutes of your time.
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…)
I’ve talked before about the Virtual Goals project that I worked on a few months back, and in this post I’d like to talk a bit more about one of the techniques that we used during the project: Wizard of Oz prototyping
This technique (named of course after the famous book by L. Frank Baum) is in my opinion one of the most powerful ways of experimenting and developing user interfaces dealing with smart systems, because it allows you to test even when there is no smart system to start with!
The idea is fairly simple: you make a prototype in which all of the actions which will eventually be attributed to the computer system are actually performed by a person.
Let’s illustrate with an example; let’s say you want to make a system that recognizes (more…)
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.
The goal of this project was to evaluate the usability of the Alcatel-Lucent IP Touch 4018 office phone and to propose a re-design of the phone according to the findings of the performed tests. The team consisted of 6 Design for Interaction master students of the TU Delft working directly for Alcatel-Lucent, a global telecommunications corporation.
Graphical user interface, 3D environment, single point touchscreen, communication & marketing
Design Goal:
For the marketing and communication efforts of Baaramee, one of the islands of The World project in Dubai, an interactive 3D environment was conceived to allow possible investors and buyers to visualize and interact with the project. I was asked to develop a graphical user interface with which users could interact with the system through a touchscreen interface.
Project duration:
100 hours
Methods used:
System flowcharts to communicate with programmers
Interactive concept presentation to communicate with programmers and management
This is a project management system that I put in place for 3D capacity’s website. It is made in flash supported by xml files containing the project data. With it, it was possible to keep all the relevant information (delivery dates, contacts, file folders and communication) in a single place for both 3D capacity staff, as well as for the clients.
By clicking on the screen-shots below you can see a demo of how it works (except for the possibility to save data which is not supported).
TweenSense, a company specialized in 3D visualization of architectural projects, needed a standard and practical, yet attractive way of delivering the final products to their clients. It had to be attractive and time-effective. For this, I developed a CD which could be easily customized through a very simple application, so that it would have the unique content that each project demands. The application even generated automatically customized CD stickers and covers for the given project.
By following this link you can download a demo version of the CD as well as a copy of the customizing application.
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.
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.
