designswarm thoughts

As I prepare my talk for next week’s Xtech in Paris, frantically trying to read the books that got delivered too late, I wonder about the people who do the conference circuit and have to give talks every other week. I think, from what I’ve seen and heard, that there are 2 types of speakers who work very differently on their talks:

1. The gardener: Matt is a good example of someone who starts off talking about a subject on a smaller scale and slowly adjusts it and adds content as time goes by.

2. The improviser: Bruce Sterling would be the prime example here of someone who masters their material extremely well. He flavors it differently picking up some things for a certain type of audience and shaping it to make it relevant to them. I’ve seen him speak twice and seen a number of videos of his talks and it’s always quite impressive.

So there, this is my first proper conference talk, and I am quite nervous, especially since i’m addressing the main subject of Ubicomp in a very different way. Hopefully I’ll try to string together the things that interest me the most about ubiquitous computing, the internet as a product designer and what this means for our cultural perception of the material world. More on that very soon I promise : )

A psychological analysis of me by Alejandro

“i was thinking about you, i think you are really strange
4/25/07 10:09 PM
cause you;re an industrial designer and all that, so you are supposed to be a very 3d person
4/25/07 10:10 PM
but it turns out that no, your 2d to the bone
4/25/07 10:10 PM
you’re
4/25/07 10:10 PM
i mean the lamp, that’s 2d, like an ipod, you see.. that’s a 2d thing (im talking only about the appereance)
4/25/07 10:11 PM
and topoware.. that’s 2d.. 2d that is used to indicate 3d, but is 2d
4/25/07 10:11 PM
the stint thingy. 2d
4/25/07 10:12 PM
the list goes on and on
4/25/07 10:12 PM
you know
4/25/07 10:12 PM
you can fool everyone but not me, you;re 2d”

IN/D label is kindly sponsoring the appearance of Topoware at the Milan Furniture Fair, do come and say hi!

Since i can never stand still for very long, I’m very proud to announce the 2nd project that will be exhibited at the Milan Furniture Faire this year: Topoware, a collection of cheeky tableware that examines the territories of our eating habits. This was designed with my great friend Karola Torkos.Go and visit the site and come and say hi if you’re in town!

I am quite proud to be presenting at the Milan Furniture Fair this year 2 projects, I’ll talk about the second one very soon. But for now, the Good Night Lamp will be exhibited at the Dotdotdot space in Milan. Come and say hi! Videos and pictures will be available after the fair, so you really have to come ;)

Major update:

Now: I am a strategic designer for Blast Radius until the end of April. I’m also doing some screen-based interaction design for Thinglink, Jaiku and Independent IP.

Jan 28th to Feb 2nd: I taught a workshop on service design to undergraduate students at the Higher Institute of Integrated Product Development in Antwerp, Belgium.

Feb 28th to March 4th: Went to new Delhi for Doors of Perception 9: Juice to represent Ulla-Maaria from Thinglink. Live-blogged some talks and took way too many pictures.

April 18th to 23rd: OMG, it’s that time of the year again! I will be presenting 2 projects for the Milan Furniture Fair. Topoware and the Good Night Lamp. Come and say hi!

May: I will be based in London, available for coffee, tea, whatever. I’ll be looking for new collaborations at that point. I will also be speaking at Xtech in Paris about semantics of objects and ubicomp.

June: After 3 years abroad, I return briefly to Canada to see my brother get married. Brief stop-over in NYC.

July onwards: Based in London and available for work!

Will be live blogging from the Doors official conference (much much more thoughts on the week I just spent in the next few days of course) on Tastythinking. Follow me there!

Just letting you know I’m deep in workshops, eating street food, walking around the most desolate areas of Delhi and generally taking about a million pictures of Doors 9: Juice on my flickr stream. Enjoy!

Back to the usual rants on the 8th of March.

Just a little public service announcement that until the 7th I will be in Delhi for the latest edition of Doors of Perception 9 conference in Delhi in India. If there’s internet, expect thorough live-blogging, if not, then see you next week!

The week is finally over and my student’s work was great! I invited them to post all of their service ideas online and will be updating this post with the links as time goes by. They also conducted a short interview, nothing none of you don’t already know. We didn’t really get to the core ideas about interaction design which some of the other professors talked about. Pity.

1. SNAILMAIL
Jan, Simon and Andy thought about how to bridge the digital divide and allow metaphors to converge. SnailMail is a service that allows you to send an email to an elderly person even if they don’t have an email address. That email would be printed out and sent via the postal service to that person. In return they could write a regular letter and send it through regular mail but with special envelopes provided by the service. In time, the elderly person would understand the concept of using email and eventually transition out of the service.

2. MR SHOP4U
Designed by Dries, Ellent and Maxime, this service is quite complex but holds a lot of potential in my opinion. Mr Shop4u is a service that aims to piggyback on local services to reduce the amount of packaging of frehs goods at the source. A convenient and online virtual shopping experience allows you to pick your goods and then get them delivered by local bikers that give you boxes you can then hand back to the service at your next delivery. Very smart.

Video on Youtube

3. Mod, this service by Carmen, Klaas, Wouter and Nils caters to people who want to discover new places to hang out in. Depending on their mood, calculated by a bracelet the service provides, you would be suggested a location to spend and evening. the bracelet also helps you locate that place by indicating which direction to walk in, since the last thing you want to do is pull out a map late at night. Then you can feedback to the system which takes that information into consideration when picking the next place or for other users in general, recording what the good nights are and the less interesting night are within a same location.

4. Braceme is a service idea from Bert, Tom and Eva Teresa that explores the different ways in which we can connect while in urban environments. You would go buy a Braceme bracelet and fill in a survey to highlight some caracter traits, likes and dislikes. This information would be implanted in this bracelet that would respond quite visually to whether anyone in your direct environment has more or less things in common with you. This bracelet is coupled to a mobile application that allows you to tweak the visual notifications you would get on your bracelet and also allow you to send your picture to the service who relays it to that person to establish a meeting.

You can find the details of the workshop i’m conducting on service design with industrial design students on the workshop blog.

My introduction presentation here (pdf)

Closing presentation here here.

Enjoy!

I finally de-lazied a bit and am slowly putting up videos of my past works, there are a lot of them but with Youtube I no longer have any excuse : P

The Hungries videos.

As I mentioned previously I’ll be teaching a service design workshop at the Higher Institute of Product Development in Antwerp next week. This is the brief I wrote for them:

“Industrial designers, in light of our growing environmental concerns, are being asked to be more and more “green” or eco-friendly, choose the right materials to make more biodegradable, easy to recycle or disassemble objects. Another wave of thought though, fueled by the likes of John Thackara, Ezio Manzini and Live|work advocate for the development of services where objects become “touch points” to an experience or a service being provided. Who you are should be defined as what you have access to and not what you own in this model.

In this workshop we will be working to dig a little deeper in the roles that objects and products take on within services. We will try to design services, the objects that allow these services to exist and will explore some presentation and design techniques such as experience prototyping and video prototyping.

Useful for the workshop: Camera and/or Videocamera”

I’ll be working on the actual layout of the workshop and the presentations I will make at the beginning of the week and post them up this weekend.

So I thought that for my first actual post of the year I’d be a little audacious and inspired by this meme reveal 5 things about me. I’m not promising they’ll be interesting though : )

1. I NEVER have cereal WITH milk in the bowl. I’ll always have a glass of milk on the side, have a spoonful of cereal and then gulp down some milk after. Always done it, don’t ask me why, can’t remember.

2. I always make my bed because of John Le Carré’s book “The perfect spy”. There’s a bit in it about making your bed as a way to order your life or something.

3. I wore the Hijab when I was 14, when my family and I were living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for 6 months. That was not a fun time for a teenage girl let me tell you.

4. I would kill for dark chocolate. Milky chocolate is so inferior.

5. I used to be a lifeguard. Worked on a lakeside beach for 2 summers, red bathingsuit and all.

How’s that for blog confessions? : )

Once again, after my 2 summer geek brunches, I put together last night a new year geek apperitivo, seeing as the most italian of geeks: Massimo was visiting me.

People present last night:

Matt Biddulph

Massimo Banzi

Robert Gaal

James Burke

Tijs Teulings

Jan Princen

Karola Torkos

Yasima Haryono & Robert