RFID links

Way up in the right column of this page....couldn't include the delicous feed into this post so had to go for the right column (won't accept javascript in posts..)

Touchable Services - Ikea Notes Concept

The concept base itself upon people having a need for planning and discussing purchases that has a (larger) impact on their daily life, both socially and economically. There is a huge difference in planning the purchase of a sofa compared to purchasing a candle holder or a picture frame. What are the needs of tools for an individual or a couple furnishing their first apartment? How do those people discuss and negotiate their personal preferences, financial situation and time used to plan a trip to Ikea?

Our idea is to make it possible to tag, store and manage items you are considering to buy in an IKEA store in such a way that it is possible to discuss, compare different and variations of the same item (color, textiles, dimension, price range etc.). What information is useful? What information do you bring to Ikea and what information do you bring home with you from Ikea? How do you initiate and process the information in such a system?

This one week project was done in cooperation with Markus, David and Knut.

Research
As a start we had a small informal interview with another student at AHO Sigrun Vik, that has worked at Ikea’s kitchen department here in Oslo. She brought up several interesting observations around how the customers act, react, orientate and perceive Ikea. A list of some of the findings is listed below:

- A lot of people do not understand the Ikea coding system (blue tags are products in external storage, red tags are found in the storage inside the store)
- Not everyone understand they have to write down the product numbers they are interested in buying/picking up, causing a lot of confusion when trying to discuss it with an employee or when trying to find it in the storage department
- The 3D-kitchen planner tool is very popular among the customers
- The Ikea building(s) in itself is hard to navigate due to poor visual language
- Ikea has an employee standing in the entrance greeting people and is placed there to help people find way around the building. Yet, most people that get help are simply going to the next counter and ask for help again.
- The customers often have trouble describing/explaining the items they are discussing with employees (often have to take the employee with them to the displayed piece to show it)

Concept
The concept we presented on fridays presentation was a simple mobile interface that allowed the user to interact with the price-tags and posters found at Ikea.

The intention was to allow the customer to pick up and store the products he/she was interested in on his mobile-phone. The info displayed on the phone interface presented the product itself (visually), the basic information (dimension, location, price etc) and also allowed the user to write down short messages (like an SMS).

Once an item was picked up, the user could either keep it (save) or leave it. If keeping it, one would get the option of saving it in a category, i.e. “Todays session” or “my new kitchen.”

We mapped out two possible uses of such a service:
1) The customer could use it to navigate and keep track of items he/she needed to pick up at the storage before paying for it
2) It would allow the user to “take home” items for further discussions with his family, friends.

We also discussed the possibilities to add textile samples and colors on furniture so that it could be of direct use when discussing furnishing of the users home. (The scenarios are fully described and illustrated in the pdf-presentation: see url at the bottom of this post)

Beneath you will see some interface sketches for the idea described above:

1) Introduction Screen (left) and the initial menu (right). We chose to let the user get a saving option right away so he could set his “default” saving directory for the session easing up the workload when saving items later on

2) Once the user has picked up an item he gets the option of leaving it or saving it. He can at any time browse down to see all the info attached to that item before saving it (bottom left). If he chooses to save the item, the menu from the start shows up with his predetermined session/directory (as chosen at the start) making the saving a simple 2 click confirmation.

2) When an item has been saved, it is displayed on the mobile phone display. Using the left and right arrow allows the user to browse through all the saved items in that session/directory. Using the down key displays the additional information attached to the item (bottom images). Pressing the menu button will allow the user to skip to another session.

Downloads

Presentation: Presentation_IkeaNotes.pdf (9.3 MB)

Proudly presented by Knutta Jørgen

Touchable Services - Task Description

Background
Near Field Communication (NFC) will soon make it possible to connect the physical world to digital services. At the moment the mobile industry is thinking only about payment and ticketing, but there is a wide range of applications and services that could take advantage of this technology for other purposes.

Task
This task is about contextual research and conceptual design of services using the mobile phone as an interface to the physical world. We will work on ideas for services that combine digital information with the physical world.
The simplicity of NFC emerges from the fact that it works only at a short range, and this ties it to particular places or objects. What applications and services need to be usefully tied to specific places and objects? What kind of interaction are good for interacting between objects and our personal devices? How might existing signage, advertising and urban interfaces be complemented with local interaction?

Process
Choose a particular place or activity to observe, and base your ideas and concepts around that. You could for example choose a cafe,and work on ideas around the choosing, buying and consumption of food. Or choose a library and work around the finding and borrowing of books. It will be very helpful to spend time doing user research, in particular observation of everyday activity.

Deliverables
Find appropriate ways to explain your concept, particularly the user-experience. Use scenarios, videos, or some kind of experience prototypes to do this. Simple documentation of your user-research (photos, videos, diaries, etc.) should be produced. See www.nearfiled.org for write-ups of last years projects.

Equipment
We have Nokia RFID phones and as many RFID tags as you need to test out ideas and scenarios. We also have a collection of indoor, outdoor, card-based and people-based tags for you to use.

Reisende Roy

Dette er et konsept for Kilroy Travels - en virtuell reiseassistent.

Her ligger presentasjonen som en zip-fil med bilder.

snowflake hot blower (assignment this week)

ok...this one didn't work online.....but download the 3 files (images and processing file) and save them to the same folder to run it in processing..

Resource files:

blower (.png file)
blower on (.png file)

Download Code (opens in notepad or processing)

unique snowflakes

This is the beginning of an assignment for this week...recovering from illness :)

Launch Application

Download Code (opens in notepad or processing)

Publishing processing applications

So...I've been publishing some applications I've made in Processing. They required a lot of processing power to run all at once, so now I've made links to the application and code instead.
Here's a way to do that (step 3-5 is only done once to set things up for running the scripts):

1. Press Ctrl+E to export your application - a folder called "applet" is created automatically in the same folder your processing file is located - the file with a ".jar" extention is the one you'll use online
   
2. Upload you processing file and the .jar file to www.box.net or your own webserver
   
   
3. Download processing.txt (right click and save target as)
4. Rename the file to processing.php (needed .txt extention to be able to download)
   
5. Upload the .php file to the same location as your processing file on box.net or other
   
   
6. Make a link to the location of your processing file for viewing the code
   
7. Link to the application from you blog by making a link like this:
   http://www.ostmo.com/_filer/aho/processing/
   processing.php?file=_1_2_a_b&x=400&y=600

• "http://www.ostmo.com/_filer/aho/processing/" is the address to my files online
• "_1_2_a_b" is the name of my processing file without the extention .pde
• "400" is the width of the application (x)
• "600" is the height of the application (y)
• these variables are modified to fit your application

• use the link tool in the blogger editor to create a link
• If you want the link to open in a new window, you'll have to choose the "Edit Html" tab on the top right of the editor, find you link starting like this:
  'a href="http://...'
  and change it to
  'a target="_blank" href="http://...'
  
  the 'target="_blank"' attribute within the link tag opens a new window when the link is clicked

Good luck and good night!!

Processing ERROR :) hehehe

Have a look at this program error in processing (I've been dreaming of doing that stuff with a serious program :)

Processing - gravity

I wrote a little gravity thing today (assignment) in processing:
(click to make them stick/release from the floor/sealing..)

Launch Application

Download Code (opens in notepad or processing)

Processing freakshow

In this one I've used two "for loops" with some random variables to create a freaky friday pattern effected by mouse movement:

Launch Application

Download Code (opens in notepad or processing)

Another processing thing

In this little program, two rectangles bounce around limited by the walls of the canvas. They cannot overlap. When the smaller one hits the bigger one, the bigger one increases or decreases its speed depending on whether they collide or the smaller one pushes it in the same direction as it's already going. (spectacularly formulated hehe :)

Launch Application

Download Code (opens in notepad or processing)

Processing

We've now been introduced to a program called "Processing". It's used for making interactive on-screen mockups. The programming language is Java - close to javascript and php which I'm quite familiar with, so I've been playing semi-advanced the first days :)

Here's a little paint brush program code. Processing can be downloaded here.

Launch Application

Download Code (opens in notepad or processing)

Creating meaning with no context

I'll post an assignment here later..

Sociology, problem finding and idea generation

Sociology lecture by Dr. Rich Ling.
After an introduction to the industrial revolution and the information revolution and their effects on society, Rich talked about social networks. He has specialized in the use of mobile phones, so this dominated the lecture and discussions.
He talked about "The strength of weak ties" as a sociological theory. The theory states that your weak social ties are the ones most likely to be your recourse of anything from job opportunities to finding a boy/girl friend.
Strong ties are the people you have frequent contact with. Weak ties are people you might have shared a single experience with. You're more likely to find new business or social contacts through your weak ties than within your strong social network. This seems only logical, as the sum of your weak ties' strong ties is likely to be a lot larger than your own amount of strong ties.

Mobile phones are known to connect the small groups. A question was raised about how tight a group should be. Closed groups create ideologies. Like "we hate school" or "we love football" or "we hate black people". If the group is to tight, ideologies like these can dominate and be dangerous rules of living for everyone within the group. This makes personal views unwelcome and makes it hard for other people to penetrate and get socially accepted by the group.
So overly bounded groups are problematic, and perhaps weak ties allow to balance the group.


After this introduction to some aspects of sociology we started throwing out ideas for problem areas to work with within social networks, some of which were:

• How to reject people
• How to create a totem for a small group
  
• We defined a totem (totem pole) to be something like: an object which has some kind of significance to a group of people on an emotional level rather than functional - recurring use - ritual based
• How to counteract urbanisation
• How to increase emotional communication
• How to increase precense
• How to increase trust in groups (increase social capital)
• How to manage (more) weak links
• How to share experiences/gifts
• How to design a TV (or other) ritual that contributes to strengthening social ties
  

I grouped up with Katarina to generate ideas for the latter - how to design a TV ritual. We came up with 7 concepts:

• Combining TV with computer games
• example: you could drive a WRC rally course with the worlds best drivers (and possibly some friends) real time - you would be competing against the pro's during the actual race
• Group subscriptions to TV programs
• subscribing to a TV program - getting together as a group to enjoy a common interest
• Outdoor TV
• outdoor big screens featuring popular block buster series like "Lost" and "Prison Break"
• kind of like a cinema - beverages and snacks
• choosing location and setting the scene to inhance the experience and match the mood in the TV series - like bonfire/torches during Lost
• could introduce a multi modal approach to experiencing TV
• Feel - heat, cold, vibration, electric shock..
  
• Sight - surroundings (artifacts, fog..)
• Smell - matching what's going on in the series
• Sound - advanced surround sound
• Touch screen TV shows for kids - participating and learning
• Educational TV with "homework"
• example: "learn how to skate", "ronaldino soccer class", "the game of poker"
• perfect for kids or grownups to get together and share new experiences through learning rituals
  
• AR TV (Augmented Reality TV)
• AR is a way of combining the real world with computer generated elements
• example: projecting glasses and headset to hang out with your friends around the world while enjoying a movie....or something :)
  
• TV + chat room combo
• layer of graphics on top of a TV show where you can chat with buddies while watching the show
  

The ideas will be presented tomorrow, after which we'll pick one to refine towards Monday 28.

"Interaction Design" - course introduction 21.08.06

The "Interaction Design" course started today at Oslo School of Architecture and Design. I'm taking this course in addition to the theme course "Exploring Creativity" course during my 7th semester of industrial design at AHO. Simon Clatworthy, Mosse Sjaastad and Daniel Senn are responsible for the course.
This blog will be a collection of notes, thoughts and reflections intended for personal use, but feel free to have a read if you find anything of interest!