EIT ICT Labs

The EIT ICT Labs Master School offers two year programmes where you can choose two universities in two different European countries to build a curriculum of your choice based on your skills and interest. The school offers double degrees, which combines technical competence with a set of skills in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. While you get an excellent theoretical education, you also get the opportunity to work with European top research institutes and leading business partners.

Deadline for applications: February 15th 

Visit EIT ICT Labs Master School on

• http://eitictlabs.masterschool.eu
• http://www.facebook.com/ICTInnovation
• http://www.linkedin.com/company/eit-ict-labs-master-school
• http://twitter.com/eitictlabsms ”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The vision for this course is that Industrial Design will be about Intelligent Products which are Adaptive with respect to the user and to the environment.

Moreover Industrial Design will not only be concerned with products but more and more with Systems and Services. This is because the products are connected, for example via the Internet and via wireless connections and because the users are connected through their social context.

One of the most important tasks for designers is to explore what things mean to humans. The explorations, coupled to constructive activities, will lead to innovative Products, Systems and Services. Adaptive systems have sensors, computation and actuators.

Whereas for traditional Industrial Design products it would be enough to create drawings and CAD models, for Intelligent Products, Systems and Services it is much better to create experiential prototypes as well.

ICE EMJD

The deadline of the EMJD ICE Call for Application is approaching: 15 January 2012 at 12 AM CET.

The Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Programme in Interactive and Cognitive Environments offers PhD candidates a education programme in the field of research related to computer science, electronic and telecommunication engineering. Candidates must hold a Master of Science (M.Sc.) degree or equivalent title and in-depth knowledge and understanding of the principles of ICT engineering.

TU/e is involved in the research area of “Design for Social Interaction”.

More about EMJD/ICE, see www.icephd.org.

A new round of  EMJD call for application is open. Download ICE_call_III_cohort (PDF) for details.

LIGHT THROUGH CULTURE

The Final Day to Finalize

During the past two weeks, 14 young designers from the Netherlands and China worked together intensively in a masterclass led by the OPENLIGHT creative light laboratory.

For two days, the team lived with Beijing’s cleaners, bus drivers, parents and school kids.

They turned their insights from Beijing Culture into three lighting concepts, which we show here in three cylinders. The purpose is a dialogue about how smart lighting can contribute to a healthy city.

The presented installations are realised by technologies such as intelligent systems and LEDs, which reveal new design opportunities.

At OPENLIGHT, the creative lab of the Intelligent Lighting Institute (ILI, Eindhoven, the Netherlands), we explore for instance how light can help us focus, reflect, regulate our biorhythms, improve safety or escape from hectic everyday life.

OPENLIGHT initiated ‘Light through Culture’ to respond to cultural challenges in various cities, such as here in Beijing with Tsinghua University. We present the results for you in three cylinders:

LOST IN BEIJING

LOST IN BEIJING

Xiaohua is one of the 2 million urbanites without a Beijing ID. Six years ago he left his hometown and family, to earn money. Non stop work, no time to live a life beside his work.

He helps to shape a city that is anonymous to him. He feels lost in a city that is not his own. Soon, he will have to return to the region where he belongs.

Did he only loose some years of his life in return for money?

We asked Beijing workers and understood their desire to leave a personal mark in the city. Could their unique identity bring a personal and human face to the city?

In this cylinder, we use light to give recognition to those who built Beijing with loyalty.

Could light help to recognise your location in a place that is anonymous to you?

WATTS MATTER

WATTS MATTER

For Zhang and her family, energy matters. Many Beijing families have only one lamp in their house.

Zhang exactly knows that her light bulb only uses 12 Watts of energy: Saving watts means saving money. It means more money for the future of her child.

Saving (energy) is one of the common habits in Beijing.

At the same time, bright spaces have become a luxury to aspire to: “A lot of light is for the rich. Darkness is for the poor. A lot of light is beautiful”, Zhang says.

In this cylinder we show that Less is More could also apply to light: this installation never uses more than 12 watts at a time, no matter which switch you pull.

Can you find a lighting setting that saves energy and gives you a feeling of luxury at the same moment?

PEACE IN THE CROWD

PEACE IN THE CROWD

Wener is 13 years. School is intense. Short eye exercises are one of the few possibilities to relax. Goal: be focussed again. Perform. Be the best student you can.

Mother Limin escapes everyday life by taking her car for a nightly drive around Beijing. Destination: inner peace.

Beijing is in a competitive mode. It is hard to find time for personal reflections and emotions.

We explore how the lighting in public transit spaces helps us to find inner peace in moments which are normally wasted. In the cylinder you experience natural movements. Imagine the attraction of a woodfire, or a shadow of a tree waving in the wind. Through light these natural movements are synchronised with the movement of a crowd of people.

How does it feel to achieve ‘inner peace in a crowd’? (ancient Chinese saying)

Slow down and you will be rewarded.

Guest Professor Appointment

September 5, 2011. I am very proud of being appointed as a Guest Professor at School of Digital Media, Jiangnan University. I am looking forward to more productive cooperation with my Chinese colleagues.

Source: http://dm.jiangnan.edu.cn/dm/#/新闻公告/latest_news_62.

9月5日下午，胡军客座教授受聘仪式在数字媒体学院410报告厅隆重举行。数字媒体学院院长刘渊、党委书记曹瑛、副院长王峰、陈秀宏、殷俊、党委副书记陈炜昀等出席了受聘仪式。

仪式上，数字媒体学院院长刘渊首先简要介绍了胡军教授的基本情况。胡军教授现就职于荷兰埃因霍温理工大学，他曾先后获西北大学数学学士学位、西北大学计算机科学硕士学位以及荷兰埃因霍温理工大学博士学位。他先后担任全欧华人专业协会联合会理事、全荷华人协会联合会理事、 荷兰华人学者和工程师协会秘书长、荷兰华人学者和工程师协会主席、荷兰华人经济技术中心理事会理事等职务。胡军教授主要从事计算机科学理论与实践、人机交互理论及设计方面的研究，近年来发表高水平学术论文10多篇，会议论文30余篇，出版专著10余部，多次承担欧盟研究项目及各类地区性横向项目。

接着，胡军教授与在场师生们分享了他个人的科研经历和感悟，并表示非常乐意担任江南大学客座教授，并由衷希望在任职期间与我校师生加强沟通、增强合作、共育成果。

随后，刘渊院长为胡军教授颁发了江南大学客座教授聘书。刘院长对胡军教授担任我校客座教授表示衷心的感谢和热烈的欢迎。他表示，能够聘请胡军教授担任客座教授，将对我院人才培养、学科发展、对外合作等方面起到积极的推动作用。据悉，胡军教授在为期两年的聘期中，将致力于以下方面的工作：1.推动合作英文版专著的出版；2.参与辅导硕士和博士研究生；3.就交互设计、基于物联网的设计、或面向社交网的设计开设研究生课程，或就软件、图形界面、可用性开设本科课程；4.与相关老师合作，就与物联网和社交网有关的设计开展具体的科研工作；5.和江南大学合作，在International Journal of Art and Technology组织一期英文特刊；6.进一步推动江南大学、埃因霍温理工大学双方在教学和科研方面的合作，推动包括浙江大学在内的三方合作。

数字媒体学院

2011.9.5

On December 17, the faculty board visited the theme Realities. The following presentation was given to show:

• Development of the theme over time
• Participating members/groups
• Vision & Ambition
• Research (plans)
• Education (plans)
• Integration
• Organizational structure, infrastructure (available + planned)

[DOWNLOAD|PDF, 3M]

De Food Robots

Knol-ontwerp takes the AdMoVeo on tour  with Nerdlab. AdMoVeos serve as ‘de food robots’, catching the attention from ‘Cursor’, the university newspaper of TU Eindhoven:

“TU/e’s TUlip vertoont kunsten op Nerdlab

7 oktober 2010 - Mediakunstenaars, technici en wetenschappers presenteren hun werk op het gebied van robotica tijdens ‘Nerdlab 8: Robots on tour’. Het multidisciplinaire festival strijkt zondag 10 oktober neer in Eindhoven, om precies te zijn bij TAC aan de Vonderweg. Onder meer de TUlip van de faculteit Werktuigbouwkunde mag er laten zien wat hij kan.

Interactieve installaties, diverse demonstraties, optredens en films zijn op Nerdlab te zien. De presentaties bestaan uit robot art en kinetics, maar ook experimenteel onderzoek op het gebied van robotica. Onder andere de ‘TUlip’, de 1.20 meter hoge ‘humanoid’ van de TU/e-faculteit Werktuigbouwkunde, mag tijdens Nerdlab8 zijn kunsten vertonen. De robot kan zelfstandig lopen en bewegingen uitvoeren en heeft twee minicamera’s op de kop waarmee hij objecten of gezichten kan herkennen en volgen (lees meer over de TUlip in de Cursor van volgende week).

De TU/e was ook betrokken bij de totstandkoming van de Food Robots (zie foto) van het ontwerptrio Knol, dat mede wordt gevormd door twee alumni van de faculteit Industrial Design. De robots serveren op wegwerpservies een mix van gezond en goed eten. Verder zijn onder meer de synthesizer auto van Gijs Gieskes te zien, de bizarre ‘robotdieren’ van beeldend kunstenaar Erik Fakkeldij en de Mechanische Dirigent van Bert Vogels.

Nerdlab is georganiseerd door de Digitale Werkplaats ’s-Hertogenbosch in samenwerking met Noisivion uit Breda en het Eindhovense MAD Emergent Art Center. (MvdV)”

[Original article from the Cursor website][PDF version, 145K]

News about our visit on the website of Jiangnan University:

• http://www.sodcn.com/detail.asp?n_id=441 (Click here for Google translation)
• http://xinwen.jiangnan.edu.cn/xyzl/2010/0622/5559.html (Click here for Google translation)

[Show as slideshow]

Dance, robot!

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.

Read the part about AdMoveo or you may want to have a look at all these inventions.

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]

Serge in Cursor

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 (PDF, 2M),

“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.

Looking for the pet

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.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Abstract Virtual societies and virtual worlds are now patriotically a part of lives of many people, especially the younger generations who have been growing up with the internet and mobile networks. Negative influences such as internet addiction and aggressive behavior have drawn attentions from researchers. As a result the focus has been on how to prevent them from spending too much of time in virtual societies and virtual worlds. A more interesting approach would be, by positively transferring or exchanging the values between the virtual and the real, to reach a more balanced experience in both worlds.

“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.”