–Engage

I haven’t spoken about my teaching here in a while b/c well while I’ve been enjoying it there hasn’t been anything compelling to share yet. No story worth expanding on.

Here is something worth talking about!

Now I have that story. The last 10 weeks a graduate class in Interaction Design and an undergraduate class in industrial design (taught by Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness) were sponsored by Freescale (a chip manufacturer) to help them envision the transformation of the netbook category away from ATOM, Intel Chips towards ARM processors that Freescale and some other corporations make and distribute.

The challenge had 3 major compoenents:

1. Change the form factor so that they don’t bring up expectations that it is just a mini-laptop.
2. Redesign the GUI of the OS so that it is targeted towards the needs of specific market segments.
3. Target both the form factor and the OS GUI to the following markets: Tweens, Teens, and Niche adult markets.

I am very excited about all the work. A segment of the student team will be presenting this work at the Computex conference happening in Taipei, Taiwan next week. Freescale and other ARM chip manufacturers are really excited about this market space as a real opportunity for them to break the Intel monopoly on consumer computing experiences.

The work started out with some good contextual research and branched out from there into interesting ID and IxD methods and practice.

The entire story is available as a process book and there is a presentation and videos as well.

It’s all here!

And I hope you leave lots of comments. (Be Brutal!)

So finally after 3 months of waiting the next large chunk of vids are up on line via Library.IxDA.org.

My faves include:

ME! – Foundations of Interaction Design

Jared Spool & Friends: Hiring the next generation of interaction designers

(at around the 46min mark you can see me causing a ruckus during Q&A. It’s real fun!)

It is rare that I’m really impressed with a new interaction design paradigm or application of existing paradigms. Reactable is the PhD project at Pompeu Fabra University and is now a company based on that work. I feel like an idiot after reading this that I am completely unaware of this system, and I’m going to confidently assume that I’m not alone and share it with you all. Here are 2 videos of the product that combines so many different elements of the surface table idea: touch gestures, idiogram recognition and manipulation, and graphical feedback leading to metaphor recognition & manipulation:
Part 1:

Part 2