People and Prototypes

Paper prototyping—in very early, sketch-based prototypes like these, designers can still simulate the user experience (note the use of the smaller post-it to represent a pull-down menu), but ineffective solutions can simply be placed in the recycling bin.


Designing interactions is regularly offering chapters to download. Right now one of my favorite chapter, People and Prototypes, is up!


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Algorithmic film assembly using toy gestures

A new input device for video capturing and editing! Designed for young children, ages five and up, it allows them to craft compelling movies through the motion analysis of their interaction with toys.


A child playing with Picture This and his Naruto action figure

Continuing my research on perspective taking and tangible video editing, I recently finished the development of Picture This, a video editing and capturing device designed for young children. It allows them to craft compelling movies through the motion analysis of their interaction with toys. Children's favorite props alternate between characters and cameramen in a film. As children play with the toys to act out a story, they conduct algorithmic film assembly.

Picture This's web site.

In my prior work, Moving Pictures, I wanted to offer children the opportunity to gather imagery from their environment in the form of short video clips captured on video camera platforms modified for the application. I wanted to provide a transparent experience for the user, in which the cumbersome process of capturing and editing becomes fluid in the improvisation of a story and accessible as a way to create a final movie.

Web site for my past work on Moving Pictures.



Tangible interfaces combine operations on physical objects with digital data. I have sought to develop interfaces where either digital data can be overlaid onto physical objects in a display space or physical objects can act as handles into the digital space. The tangible handle is more than a marker or place-holder for digital data. It has the power to materialize and redefine our conception of space and content during the creative process.



If the toy had a visual perspective immediately accessible to the child, a new world would be opened to her. The toy could potentially bring the child into exploring visual and narrative perspectives of these character props, expanding her discovery and understanding of social interrelationships.

A video snippet of Picture This and a 6 minutes video for its interaction design.

The Picture this tool is an audiovisual device that combines two digital video cameras and two accelerometers. The tool captures motions, video and sound in real-time while an algorithmic video editing system composes a movie from these inputs. A motion based editing engine fluidly assembles the film as its story is being narrated, while respecting the conventions of continuity editing, namely, a sequence of shots that appear to be continuous.



This style of film editing is made possible in Picture This by detecting turn taking behaviors between the toys. Two toy props are augmented with video cameras and custom accelerometer hardware. They use the Picture This tool both as a doll hand-bag or a doll audiovisual recorder. The tool is flexible for a child to take the perspective of props she selected for her movie.

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure

Aerial Jewelry

I design Jewelry in the form of aerial patterns of a city. My vision is to have in miniature the multitude of patterns that one can see from a distance.

I research on how digital technologies make us re-evaluate the physical world. We perceive a new physicality through digital materials. In this project, I study the materiality perceived through aerial technologies. I believe that this modification of our perception of the environment is developed through our experience with the digital.

Now that we constantly travel by plane, use GIS, google map, satellite imagery, our vision is expanded. Our everyday objects have a language that adapt itself to our influences. As much as the car has influenced painting and the representation of space and movement, I want to show how the use of new technologies can change our way to design personal objects as exemplified by Aerial Jewelry.

Aerial Jewelry web site

A stretchy fabric controller

Created by Angela Chang, Zstretch is a fabric device that can capture the richness of active touch interactions for controlling music interactions. Much of the prior work on integrating electronics with textiles focused on rigid, exact places for touching the fabric, rather than supporting the many actions our hands and bodies can create. The project explores how to support the large range of forces that people apply when interacting with fabric.

Paper for Nime 2007

Operation for adults!

Operation, game by Hasbro

Today, I met with TMG alumni Paul Yarin. One of his latest project, the interactive sensing module for laparoscopic trainer, developed with Wendy Plesniak reminded me of the funniest childhood game Operation created by Hasbro. The child practices coordination skills by removing the patients symptoms with the tweezers.



The sophisticated and impressive Interactive sensing module for laparoscopic trainer is a self-contained simulator for structured testing and training of skills used in laparoscopic surgery. Digital video and electronic sensors capture user performance and is approved to be used by medical centers to train and test critical laparoscopic skills. This is such a clever implementation. The advantages of physical objects as tools and the power of computer simulation are combined at their best.



"This interactive laparoscopic training simulator combines the best of physical and virtual simulation into a plug 'n' play solution. It combines validated physical reality exercises, computerized assessment, and validated McGill Metrics. Electronic sensors and digital video capture user performance with a PC interface."


An example of practice task

Real Laparoscopic Simulation's web site

Digital, mechanical and eletronic fashion show

Amanda Parkes just gave me the booklet she designed for Unravel, a technology-driven fashion event at Siggraph 2007 this year. A premiere. I am so lucky to share an office with the curator and fashion chair of this event!

"Unravel" brings together the works of international designers and artists to present innovative and interactive works in computational and conceptual couture, socially conscious fashion, science-inspired from, and new technologies in textiles.

If you attend the event in San Diego, California, you will see:

· Solar Bikini by Andrew Schneider. A solar film bikini that charges your iPod! (With a USB connection!) The suit is a standard medium-sized bikini swimsuit retrofitted with 1" x 4" photovoltaic film strips sewn together in series with conductive thread. The cells terminate in a 5 volt regulator into a female USB connection


Solar Bikini

· Walking City and Index of Indifference by Yin Gao, projects that I particularly love! Dresses respond to their physical and acoustical environment, the ethereal garments just breath ...


Walking City

· Intimate Controllers by Jenny Chowdhury. A platform where video games are played by couples touching each others.

· Smoking Jacket by Fiona Carswell. The jacket has a built-in pair of lungs on the front. As the wearer smokes, the lungs fill up with the exhaled cigarette smoke and begin to gradually darken over time.


Smoking Jacket

· Hacking Couture, a web portal that allows the launching of new fashion aesthetics by the continuous contribution of users of the site, giving an exploratory spin to the traditional design process in fashion, allowing a collective collaboration in means of self-expression and the enhancement of creativity by the application of the concepts of Open Source.

· Self-Sustainable chair by Joo Youn Paek, a conceptual garment that motivates users to consistently switch between walking and sitting as a loop behavior on the street. The balance between exercise and rest would be maintained by wearing this suit.


Self-Sustainable chair

· Muttering Hat & Talk to Yourself Hat by Kate Hartman.
Muttering Hat A pair of muttering balls are tethered to the hat. They may be stuck to your ears, so that all other noise is obstructed by the mutterings, or they may be detached, providing the opportunity to escape from the mutterings or to share them with a friend.
Talk to Yourself Hat Through the use of a communication system embedded in the hat, you may speak outloud to yourself while retaining the right to a somewhat private conversation.


Muttering Hat

· Knitter's Tapestry by Daniela K. Rosner and Kimiko Ryokai.

An experimental dress knit with recordable magnetic tape that travels with the knitter and captures the knitter's experience as she knits.


Knitter's Tapestry


Knitter's Tapestry - detail

· Solar vintage, we will become silhouettes by Elena Corchero, a collection of accessories for the eco-fashion-minded in which technology meets tradition.


Solar Vintage

· Jacket Antics by Barbara Layne and Studio subTela, that feature unique texts and designs scrolling through the LED array on each of the backs.

· Kameraflage(TM) by Connor Dickie, a display technology that is invisible to the naked eye, yet is visible when imaged with a digital camera.


On this picture, the thunder-cloud has a lightening-bolt appear in the photograph

· Negociation by Daniela Kostova, Galina Kumanova, Olivia Robinson, a wearable interactive video system that combines textiles and technology to explore concepts of identity creation, presence and absence, integration and estrangement in different political and cultural environment. The wearers of the suit merge with the visual environment they inhabit.


Negociation


Negication' still during a performance: The persons seem to disappear.

· Cherry Blossoms: When War Comes Home by Alyssa Wright addresses the disparity between human suffering and perception of that suffering.

A mapping technology that transports one into the world of another, Cherry Blossoms gives witness to the tragedy of war. A backpack is outfitted with a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative locations are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. A technology for empathy, Cherry Blossoms honors the human cost of war.


Cherry Blossoms, a cloud of confetti, each confetti showing the name of a civilian who died in the Iraq war and the circumstances of his/her death.

· Shutters by Marcelo Coelho and Steve Helsing, is a soft kinetic membrane for environmental control and communication.

It is composed of actuated louvers (or shutters) that can be individually addressed for precise control of ventilation, daylight incidence and information display. By combining smart materials, textiles and computation, Shutters builds upon other façade systems to create living environments and work spaces that are more energy efficient, while being aesthetically pleasing and considerate of its inhabitants’ activities.

· Bracelets and Reconfigure, two projects by Leah Buechley.

Each bracelet, woven on a traditinoal bead loom out of beads, conductive thread and surface mount LEDs, is a 5x10 display matrix that can be programmed with animations like cellular automata and scrolling text. I strove to make the bracelets lovely with the electricity on as well as off; the most recent versions are almost as thin and flexible as traditional beaded jewelry, controlled with surface mount electronics and soft circuitry and powered with flexible Lithium-ion batteries.

Reconfigure is a platform for interactive performance. A reconfigurable costume consists of a torso piece and an assortment of sensing appendages that can be snapped to the torso. Sensors in the appendages include muscle flex sensors, accelerometers, bend sensors and touch sensors. Sensor data is relayed to a computer, via a bluetooth module embedded in the torso, where it can be used to control or generate music, video and other multimedia content.

· Peau d'Âne by Valérie Lamontagne. Peau d'Âne, a fairy tale from Charles Perrault, is reinterpreted by giving life to the 'impossible' dresses that a young princess orders her stepfather to thwart marrying him.


Peau d'Âne

Technical diagram of Peau d'Âne.

Science Fiction movies and HCI

Forbidden Planet (1956): the “thought analyzer” is a device inherited from the planets former inhabitants, displays a 3 dimensional image.


Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies by Michael Schmitz in CS Seminar “Instrumented Spaces” SS 2003 A. Butz, C. Endres, W. Wahlster.

I was recently talking about the influence of HCI over science fiction movies but also the reverse situation on how science fiction movies and books can inspire researchers in HCI. This paper, available online, proposes an analysis of several science fiction movie examples related to HCI.

Abstract: Science Fiction movies have been a source for speculation about the future of technology and human computer interaction. This paper presents a survey of different kinds of interaction designs in movies during the past decades and relates the techniques of the films to existing technologies and prototypes where possible. The interactions will be categorized with respect to their domain of real-life applications and also evaluated in regard to results of current research in human computer interaction.


Minority report (2002)

Part suppliers

Adam Kumpf from the Tangible Media Group at MIT created this very comprehensive list of part suppliers for getting electronic components! A useful guide for any tech-researcher!

Interactive surfaces

Interaction with microsoft surface

Microsoft Surface, a finger interactive table to organize digital media, will be available on the market in winter 2007.
Videos.

Microsfot surface table

This very neat idea of interactive surface is in the research market for a long time now: for instance with Diamondtouch, Ali Mazalek's tangible viewpoints and James Patten' sensetable from 2000-2001. It is exciting the process of this research being revisted by giant companies for mass production. I wish they would have kept the tangible quality of objects to control digital data. Maybe Pattenstudio will take care of that part!

Video of audiopad by James Patten and Ben Recht.

Interact 2007

Prototypes of Moving Pictures

Yessss! The full paper written for Interact 2007 with Dr Hiroshi Ishii is accepted! It shows how Textable Movie designed for facilitating video production has informed Moving Pictures. It presents a mechanism to seamlessly interface the various parts in video production and present our observations. The conference topic is socially-responsible interaction. So see you in Rio de Janeiro in September!

Abstract: The paper presents a novel approach to collecting, editing and performing visual and sound clips in real time. The cumbersome process of capturing and editing becomes fluid in the improvisation of a story, and accessible as a way to create a final movie. It is shown how a graphical interface created for video production informs the design of a tangible environment that provides a spontaneous and collaborative approach to video creation, selection and sequencing. Iterative design process, participatory design sessions and workshop observations with 10-12 year old users from Sweden and Ireland are discussed. The limitations of interfacing video capture, editing and publication in a self-contained platform are addressed.

Download the 14 pages paper

Thank you all of you for your feedback!

A tiny robot walked in my office today ...

Ricordo

EMRos is this family of so-called World’s smallest autonomous self-propelled micro robots. Each creature is this tiny robot that can record and play back motions being guided by a flashlight.

Ricordo is 1 cm3 in volume and equipped with a recording and playback function. Rubie on the other end is equipped with capricious wandering function. Both were created by Epson in 1995, but I finally got to play with one today, and it is adorable! I found a web site that shows beautiful pictures of the robots as well as the nice packaging that hosts them!

video-cards

Children playing with Moving Pictures

Tangible artifacts have been linked to video as a way to support collaborative exploration of a video collection. More recently, Labrune and Mackay designed the TangiCam, a tangible camera made of two cameras on a circular frame to capture both the child and the video of the child. Researchers have worked on token-based access to digital information. See also pioneer research done by Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer.

A broad range of interactive table-tops have been designed for collaboration. From Yumiko Tanaka’s Plable, a traditional looking table under which children can build an imaginary world, to the DiamondTouch table that allows the collaboration and coordination of multiple users at the same time, designers developed a new concept for movie editing to help children understand the process of editing. In Moving Pictures, children arrange tokens on a table, guided by a GUI, in order to create and visualize the storyboard of a movie.



Plable

The Plable web site has awesome videos both of the process and the final project.

This interesting concept started to take a more "card shape" with Mika Miyabara and Tatsuo Sugimoto, the Movie cards, a set of printed cards that can be re-arranged in any order. Their bar code is used to identify them on a digital screen. Regine Debatty gives more details about this very interesting project.
Also, TVS explores the manipulation of digital video clips using multiple handheld computers.



Movie Cards

Recently, Dave Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi created the Siftables, a set of small displays that can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media. I bet that these miniature video cards will lead to very interesting projects ...
Paper on the siftables.



The siftables

Philips Design developed Pogo, a system that allows replaying visual sequences using tangible objects with a stationary computer for capturing and associating media to objects. Even though these systems invite capture and editing of the movie segments, they donnot propose the publication of the final movie created and the possibility to share it with peers remotely. For this reason, Moving Pictures integrates a videojockey mode to allow children to perform a final movie as much as inviting them to revisit the movie impact.


Pogo

Allowing authorship as a design principle in most Tangible Interfaces is rare. It is probably due to the fact that it requires a very flexible interface and a software architecture that takes care of data management. This design principle can allow children to become active participants instead of simply observers. In Moving Pictures, tangible media containers can easily be integrated in mobile technology and also be combined for performance using a video jockey platform. Maybe a new version could use the potential of the siftables ;)

The world as a palette reviewed by Pantone

Kimiko Ryokai invented I/O brush willing to use the world as a palette, well Pantone just released the Pantone's color cue, a color matching device that one can hold to any surface to know the matching paint from the Pantone library, and get it to decorate their interior. Via Metropolismag.

With the Color Cue, designers can match Pantone paint to any flat surface, including these objects from the MoMA Design Store. From top: Karim Rashid’s Kaj Watch, Frank Gehry’s cardboard Wiggle Side Chair, and Marc Berthier’s Tykho Radio. By Evelyn Dilworth

Image courtesy Pantone

An history on interactive design

Etienne Mineur was my graphic design professor at Paris VIII, now he is swimming in praise!

He just finished the interactive graphic piece for Issey Miyake and now he is about to travel around the world with his family to document on graphic designers, game designers, fashion designers. His focus will be Asia, so if you are extremely talented in design, live in Asia, and willing to spend some time with French people, you should contact him.



He regularly presents an history on interactive design. The last one was for les arts deco de Paris, l'ENSAD. I think he should be in this presentation, but in any case it is a very interesting document that he shares online.
Pdf of the presentation

Design and Intuition

Designing interactions book

Few weeks ago, I asked my advisor Hiroshi Ishii to lend me the Designing interactions book from 2007 in which he presents multisensory interaction design. I particularly liked the organization of the book in a form of a small encyclopedia of interviews illustrated by successful examples from the first PC prototypes to the existential design of the RCA interaction design department.
The book can be discovered online with streamed interviews and samples of work.

Video interviews

Video interview of Hiroshi Ishii

Video interview of John Maeda

Today, Hiroshi invited Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, to talk about "Design and Intuition" at the MIT Media Lab and to introduce his book.

abstract of the talk
Interactive technology is everywhere, seeping into every crack and cranny of our lives. It's not just the mouse that we use for pointing and clicking, plus the desktop and windows on our screens. It's the TV we watch, the iPods that help us enjoy music, video games, digital cameras, phone services, Palmtops, plus the aesthetic, social and cultural interventions that we experience. Bill Moggridge will describe a design process that is common to these examples. He will show how design opportunities can be identified by discovering people's latent needs, behaviors, and desires, and by creating new ways to serve and support them. He will demonstrate how designers can visualize new products, services, spaces, media and software-based interactions, and bring them to life by prototyping. He will discuss the values inherent to Design Thinking and the processes that can help to harness the power of intuition in designing interactions.

bio of Bill Moggridge
Bill Moggridge is cofounder of IDEO, independently ranked by business leaders as one of the most innovative companies in the world. A Royal Designer for Industry, Bill designed the world's first laptop computer. He pioneered interaction design and is one of the first people to integrate human factors into the design of software and hardware. He has been a visiting professor in interaction design at the Royal College of Art in London, lecturer in design at the London Business School and a member of the steering committee for the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. He is currently consulting associate professor in the joint program in design at Stanford University. His book Designing Interactions is available from The MIT Press.

Sculpting Behavior

Hayes Raffle not only just had two full academic papers accepted to the first class conference IDC 2007: Interaction design and Children but he is also a talented sculptor and designer. His Super Cilia Skin reflects his aesthetic sensibility and his ongoing passion for kinetic sculpture.

Video

Super Cilia Skin

After co-creating and designing the award-winning ZOOB® building system, Hayes joined the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and created Topobo, a 3D constructive assembly system with kinetic memory and the ability to record and playback physical motion.
Video



a ZOOB® creature


a Topobo creature

If you happen to be in the bay area, don't miss Hayes' talk, open to the public, that he is giving at the Berkeley Institute of Design, UC Berkeley, March 6th, from 1 to 2pm.
Information about his talk.

During the talk, he will explain how with Topobo children can assemble sculptures that dance and walk. He will present Fuzzmail a program that allow children to write a message that unfolds in time. He will show how with Jabberstamp children can embed stories, sounds and voices in their original drawings.

Interaction Design and Children

Jabberstamp? It is for adults to understand that a work of art is not a hat, but a boa digesting an elephant! - Yasmine Abbas



I teamed with Hayes Raffle to work on his Jabberstamp invention.

This is the first time I work on a project on which I am not the inventor. This collaboration is refreshing through the distance allowed by not being the actual initiator. It brings critical insights on the interaction design. Hayes asked me to join him, because of my background in toy design for children, especially the design of toys for emergent literacy. Out of the technology available, I tried to understand what could children do with the simple mechanism of associating sounds to drawings. Hayes and I end up testing the system, improving elements of the design and discussing its contribution. A pilot evaluation with children confirmed our hypothesis about the type of narrative children explore with such technological system.

We submitted a video for Siggraph'07, educator program and Jabberstamp was elected for being demoed and exhibited during the conference, the 5-9 of August 2007, San Diego, California.

A full paper Hayes and I wrote together on Jabberstamp got accepted to the Interaction Design and Children conference. The focus of the conference is on children’s role in the design and evaluation of interactive technologies. So we hope to see you in June 6-8, 2007, Aalborg in Denmark!

Abstract We introduce Jabberstamp, the first tool that allows children to synthesize their drawings and voices. To use Jabberstamp, children create drawings, collages or paintings on normal paper. They press a special rubber stamp onto the page to record sounds into their drawings. When children touch the marks of the stamp with a small trumpet, they can hear the sounds playback, retelling the stories they have created. We describe our design process and analyze the mechanism between the act of drawing and the one of telling, defining interdependencies between the two activities. In a series of studies, children ages 4-8 use Jabberstamp to convey meaning in their drawings. The system allows collaboration among peers at different developmental levels. Jabberstamp compositions reveal children’s narrative styles and their planning strategies. In guided activities, children develop stories by situating sound recording in their drawing, which suggests future opportunities for hybrid voice–visual tools to support children’s emergent literacy.

Jabberstamp is a MIT Media Lab project developed in the Tangible Media Group with Dr Hiroshi Ishii.

News (update)
July 23 07 Digital inspiration by Amit Agarwal.
July 23 07 Article in Discovery Channel by Tracy Staedter.
June 29 07 Article in Digital experience by Jonas Petersen.

Previous post on Jabberstamp.


IDC logo

Interview in my favorite blog!

For Valentine's day, Régine Debatty offered me an interview in her super blog!

Via We-Make-Money-Not-Art