From June 6 to 9, prof. Matthias Rauterberg and I were invited to the School of Design, Jiangnan University in Wuxi, China. In these 3 days, we presented our education system and our research projects to the teachers and students, had several discussions about possible cooperations in both education and research, and organized a one day workshop “discrete interaction design” for 30 students. The students were very much interested in the topics we presented, especially the interactive way of presenting them. It was a successful and fruitful visit. We definitely look forward to the cooperations.
News about our visit on the website of Jiangnan University:
Yesterday I managed a one-day workshop on dichotomies in designing distributed systems, for 25 master students in the class “Designing for Systems”. The dichotomies addressed were standalone/distributed, centralized control/decentralized control, and process-/product-oriented design, as well as a hidden agenda for the conflicts between standards and implementations. In this workshop I wanted the student to “experience” the dichotomies Instead of me telling the story.
Two types of distributed systems were focused on, client/server and peer to peer. Students were divided into four groups, one working on C/S, two on P2P and another on standardization of data and communication. They are briefed and quickly pushed into hands-on work to make a few AdMoVeo robots to dance together, in a distributed setting.
The workshop worked out quite well in terms of its designed goals, and actually it was beyond my expectations – I did not expect that robots would really dance together, but at the end of the day, all the teams managed to show something, at least partially working. One of the other things surprised me was the difficulties they had in creating and parsing XML documents, which was suggested for saving time from standardizing the data and message formats. I could have made some partially working code snippets to reduce the load.
Interested to see what the workshop is about? Here is the description. Also see the reflections from the students.
Tom’s Guide published an article by Paul Escallier, in which the AdMoVeo is featured as one of the “30 Inventions From Regular Guys”. We are happy to see that AdMoVeo is getting more attention, although we are listed as “regular guys”
17 december 2009 – Er is veel kraamvisite, veelal gewapend met camera’s, aanwezig bij de geboorte van Medsim op donderdag 10 december. Medsim is niet zomaar een baby; het is het eerste bevallingssimulatiecentrum ter wereld. De trainingsruimtes zijn gevestigd op twee verdiepingen in Kennispoort en minister Maria van der Hoeven kwam het lintje, in de vorm van een buikwand, doorknippen. De TU/e is niet alleen verhuurder van de locatie, ze levert ook de nodige techniek. [Read more: HTML, PDF]
The new game designed by Serge Offermans featured in Cursor. The game is the result of his final master project “Blurring the boundaries”. In his final report,
“Digital virtual worlds are important to the people living in them. They allow people to use other means to exploit their capabilities. Who they are, what they can do and what they experience in these worlds however, is hardly ever valuable outside the virtual. This project aimed to create an integration of the qualities of the virtual and the physical world, and in doing so allow benefit from one world in the other.
The result is a virtual world, designed specifically with integration of the worlds in mind. It literally draws the virtual world into the physical by bounding it to our physical reality and effectively placing virtual, invisible characters and objects in our physical world.
Interaction with the world is made possible by a device that channels audio from one world to the other and allows you to ‘feel’ and manipulate the world through movement and touch.
The specific world that has been worked out is designed for the use by children and their parents who can now benefit from the dynamic-ness of the virtual world without the closed medium of the PC.
Children and parents can now together experience the virtual world and spend time together while they are engaged in activities that also benefit the childs educational development. Because the world can only be perceived through touch and audio, the world stimulates the child’s imagination.”
This video shows a vision on how visitors could experience the upcoming Nationaal Historisch Museum. The video was created by the Department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology. More information is available at http://nhm.id.tue.nl/
This video, made by Sjriek Alers, has been shown as part of a Demo on DeSForM 360, the 5th International Workshop on Design & Semantics of Form & Movement October 26 & 27, 2009 Taipei, Taiwan. It is a compilation of some of the student work for the assignment Creative Programming for designers (Creapro) Showing what the students have learned in behavioral programming with the AdMoVeo robot platform and using the Arduino.
Most of the design students do not have inherent affinity towards programming and electronics. The AdMoVeo robotic platform is designed, purely for teaching the industrial design students basic skills of programming and for motivating and encouraging the design students to explore their creativity with their passions in graphical and behavioral design.
J. Hu and S. Alers, “AdMoVeo: An Educational Robotic Platform For Learning Behavior Programming,” in DeSForM 2009: Design and Semantics of Form and Movement, Taipei, Taiwan, 2009, pp. 218-219.
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“In 2009 Philips Research organizes for the first time the Philips Creative Challenge (PCC). This challenge is set up around the theme ‘hospitality’ to explore and showcase exceptional design ideas. Five Industrial Design faculties are invited to join the PCC and delegate two student teams to showcase their work at a dedicated exhibition during the Innovate! event. The PCC offers the opportunity for design education and industry to share and discuss their views on relevant themes within the field of Industrial Design.” — Philips Creative Challenge.
“Casper” is among the others, one of the two finalists, from the department of Industrial Design, TU/e. “The Caspr concepts explore hospitable behavior of digital products – for example a speaker system which shows curiosity and enthusiasm towards the guests’ music phone. Hereby the hosts open the door of their digital home and the guests can be surprised and actively stimulated to participate and share.”
The Industrial Design department has started a series of colloquia, aimed at ID staff and ID Master students. The idea is to exchange information about research efforts and inspire one another through quests and discussion. It is a tight formula. In only sixty minutes three presentations are given. One of the presenters was dr. Jun Hu, assistant professor with the Designed Intelligence capacity group.
