A Sustainable Train of Thought

Some students and professors from the RCA came to visit IDII a couple of weeks ago. We worked on some creativity activities together, and the following photos are from the “fashion show” at the end of the exercise.

Shawn with his claw contraption:

One of the RCA students with his tube-head:

Dana and Alex prepare their costumes:

Nick with his costume while Durrell Bishop (in red) looks on:

One of the RCA kids struts down the catwalk:

Further down the catwalk:

I just found a new wiki dedicated to Service Design at the aptly chosen domain of ServiceDesign.org. It’s been set up by the nice guys at live|work and will hopefully turn into a great repository for service design related information.

I’ve also been reading a compilation of articles with a service-design focus that was put together by the professors from our service design course. It’s making for some compelling reading—I want to talk about it, but I’m a little too tired right now to form complete thoughts.

In other news, today we received a brief to create a screen-based video game with physical inputs by this coming Wednesday. No small task, to be sure, but our experience with the physical computing class last fall and our recent introduction to instantSOUP (an IDII special project) should see us through.

We’re also starting to firm up thesis concepts around this time, beginning to develop our Mattel project concepts, and (in my case) continuing to look for summer internships. I’ve got my new portfolio up and running—let me know if you have any problems with it. I’m actually pretty happy I managed to get the PHP working, as the menuing system would have been a pain to maintain any other way.

As for an internship: I am particularly interested in service design and interaction design internships, but I am also interested in design firms that focus on the general themes of sustainability and experiences. I am interested in working with physical objects and experiences, and the systems within which they exist. I am also interested in the visualization of data and systems.

My thesis topics and concepts are a bit broad and vague at this point, but hopefully I can get some help from the professors with focusing/narrowing them. And the team I’m in for the Mattel project looks to be focusing on service-design concepts, which is cool.

That’s about it for now. My parents are visiting Italy for the week, and will be arriving in Milan in a couple of hours. I should probably catch some sleep before they arrive, so that I can show them all Ivrea has to offer once they arrive. This should take about 30 minutes, and then we’ll grab a coffee.

This was a long week: Tuesday felt like Friday, which is never a good sign.

Since I’ve been remiss with a definition of Interaction Design, here’s the Wikipedia to cover my oversight. And it just so happens that Interaction Design Institute Ivrea is part of the definition. Cool!

On Saturday Technogym came to visit the school. Technogym is the second-largest gym-equipment manufacturer in the world, which is a pretty big deal in Italy since they’re an Italian company. The average age in the company is 29. The cool thing was that the CEO and several directors of the company showed up on a Saturday morning at 8:30AM to see our projects and learn more about the school. Their home base is about a five hour drive away, so they arrived on Friday evening and stayed the night in Ivrea.

After showing them around the school and introducing them to some of the projects we’ve done here at IDII, several faculty lead them into a classroom where we were ready to show them three of the service design projects from last semester. I was in one of the groups that presented, and after the last group finished there was a long conversation in Italian spoken at high speed. I didn’t catch everything that was said, but later I learned that the CEO was describing to everyone else what an experience prototype is. Which was really cool because we hadn’t really explained the concept in depth and hadn’t talked about the benefits of it. But he got it!

Simply put, experience prototyping is a way to prototype a service experience. Because services take place over time and through a variety of touchpoints both human and object, and generally tend to involve intangible, qualitative aspects, they require prototyping in a way that’s different from how objects or spaces can be prototyped through, for example, models. Experience prototypes can be documented through video, but they are not video prototypes. Video prototypes are where things are made to appear to work a certain way in post-production. Rather, experience prototypes attempt to create a situation in which people behave and interact as if the service already exists. The interaction designer then looks for user insights into how the service performed as a way of grounding design decisions.

Experience prototypes are very new tools, developed only in the last couple of years, and the methodologies and body of work behind them is limited. Which is exciting for me because it means you get to discover and make the rules as you implement an experience prototype. live|work is pretty much the leading company in service design and experience prototypes, and they came to work with us during the service design project. Experience prototypes were definitely a hard sell to me, because I’ve always been taught to look at the quantitative information: 50% of people do X. But the reality is that sometimes looking at extreme cases, or designing for a specific person, can have far-reaching benefits. The best example I’ve heard so far involved the design of buses.

If you design a bus for the middle 50% of the people, as market research would tend to encourage, you will end up with one kind of bus. However, if you look at an extreme of the bell curve and design for someone who is in a wheelchair, for example, you will end up with a completely different design. However, the design for the person in a wheelchair will most likely be more convenient for everyone, not just the person in the wheelchair. I encountered this phenomenon myself in California, where the buses have low floors that are curb-height, and the interior is laid out in a more intelligent and spacious way. In other words, it was good design that benefited everyone.

This presentation wasn’t about selling a particular project, but promoting the way our school practices design. So we were really showing off the design capabilities, methodologies, and types of results the school produces. We’ll see what they think, and if they’re interested in working with us at a later date, but at the very least it was neat to have them visit us. Here’s a quick photo of them looking at one of the exhibits set up downstairs.

This past week was Salone di Mobile, the largest annual furniture show in Europe. The IDII exhibit in the Tecno space went very well. It’s interesting to see all the companies that are coming through the school these days, because a large number of them found out about the school at last year’s Salone. So it takes a while for them to make it here, but they’re definitely showing up! Technogym is an exception to this, but Frog was here a couple of weeks ago, and I believe they checked out the exhibits last year.I was also at the San Siro event on Thursday. The second-years presented some of their work, and there were a bunch of other groups and people who took over the stadium with their work, including Matthew Barney. I didn’t hang around for long, but it was probably just like any of the other parties that spread out within Milan during Salone.

Let’s see…and today we started the Mattel project, in which we design toys and games for the next four weeks. Should be fun! It’s been a while since I’ve been in the head-space of a 3 to 10-year-old, so I’m definitely getting a bit of a brain workout trying to relate to them.

Otherwise, I’m trying to finish up my portfolio. School projects are done, and I’m almost done with my past work. It will hopefully be completely online by Wednesday. Anyways, I’d better get some dinner and then cracking on it.

And yes, I will get to the rest of the trip photos just as soon as I finish my portfolio obligations.

Just a quick note:

IDII is running a summer camp for students who are between 18 and 20 years old. The ten-day course is intended to give participants an overview of interaction design in a learning-by-doing process. More information is available here:

http://www.interaction-ivrea.it/en/education/scamp2005/

Here are some more links from around the web regarding the show in Torino:

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/004279.php

http://www.coolbusinessideas.com/archives/tools_for_radio_waves_hunters.html

Here’s another article on the exhibition:

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/004264.php

Looks like we-make-money-not-art.com posted the first part of a story regarding the IDII exhibition held on Saturday in Torino. It’s interesting to see the reactions these pieces receive and what people expect of them, especially having seen these projects during earlier stages of development.

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/004248.php

Some photos from the exhibition are in my gallery.

We’re almost at the end of a four-week Physical Computing project. Thursday is presentation day, and boy I can’t wait for this to be over. We’ve been working non-stop for the last two weeks (10 hours on Sunday…woohoo!) and I’m beyond tired at this point. I’ve found that if I get somewhere near a normal amount of sleep, I wake up the next day feeling absolutely horrible: headaches, blurry vision, the works. So I think I really need a couple of days to recover from this project. In the meantime, I’m trying to hang in there until the presentations.

The good news is that tonight we got the projects fully assembled, AND THEY WORK! So hopefully all we have to do tomorrow is tie up some loose ends and prepare the presentation and perhaps (and this is a big deal) even get some sleep the night before the presentation (gasp!)

We’re working on some very conceptual projects this time. This was a conscious decision on our part; other groups are taking a more pragmatic approach. Both are equally valid, although I think it’s a little more interesting to pursue something conceptual at this point because we’ll probably be making pragmatic things after graduating…

Anyways, I realize I’ve been talking about all these projects without really describing them. I’ll admit that I’m a little paranoid at this point about how much I divulge online because there is a very real possibility of concepts and ideas getting “appropriated”—although nothing’s certain, it appears this might have already happened with one student’s project. I refer you to this article:

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/003934.php

Basically, one of the students from an earlier class at IDII developed a project where mobile phones are implanted with seeds, so that when the phones are discarded the seeds can grow into plants. Surprisingly, another group at another university very recently announced a very similar project. It’s a bit early to jump to conclusions, but Belmer (the student who developed the project at IDII) is disturbed by the whole thing, and understandably so.

At some point documentation of our projects will be placed on the web, and at that point I think there will be some evidence of their having been developed at IDII and whatnot. Intellectual property rights are definitely a big issue here (and one that has yet to be satisfactorily addressed), and I think I’m within my rights to veer towards caution. Of course I’m happy to talk about my work on a personal basis. If you’re interested, just ask me about them. However, one caveat is that sometimes it’s hard to talk about projects when they’re in the development phase because they can change so drastically.

I don’t anticipate updating this blog again before I get home to NYC on Sunday, but I’ll certainly have enough time on the plane ride to come up with some more stuff. I’d like to write some more, and I think the whole thing will help the reflective process. After working on a project for 4 weeks, it helps to regain some perspective.

Now, it’s time to sleep…

Project work has been consuming all of my time for the past couple of weeks. I’m up until 5AM on some days, I’m at school up to 14 hours at a time, I’m constantly working or thinking, and I’m having the time of my life. Our project and our presentation are both coming together rather nicely, although we still have a lot of work to do. We developed a strong story, and now we need to get everything into the computer. It’s easier now that we have a clear vision of what and how we’re presenting, but it’s still quite a ways to get there from here.

Once we’ve presented on Thursday and taken a well-deserved vacation until Tuesday, we’ll come back and spend time documenting our projects during review week.

In addition to being excited about my project, I’m also really fired up about the other projects people are working on. One project in particular deals with memories, emotions, and music. They’re collecting real data with a web form, which will be displayed via an interface that they’re developing right now. From what I’ve seen so far, it looks really good.

This group has been struggling with the expression and visualization of their concept since day one, but I think they’ve really got it nailed . . . two days or so before the presentation. But better late than never, and it looks like it will be really slick. The interface should go live after the presentation.

You can contribute your memories (anonymously, of course):

Memories mapped to music

The whole concept reminds me a lot of the fray, where people respond to published stories with stories of their own. Some really personal and private things are published—sometimes anonymously, usually not—and the quality of responses in turn stimulates more quality submissions. One of the interesting aspects of the music and memory project is that right now the web form has no feedback. That is, the results aren’t shown anywhere. Yet people have been contributing at an impressive rate, and a lot of it is quality stuff, really good stories. I’m sure that once these memories are published, the quality level of submissions will increase even more.

This group has taken the idea of the project sequence a little further than most (in that they will have produced a working website), but all the projects are good. I’m excited to see what people present on Thursday. I suspect it will be impressive. There is definitely something to be said about producing quality work, as it spurs everyone to match or exceed the previous mark. I think this spirit also exists among the faculty: the professors in the group leading the next project sequence have mentioned on a couple of occasions that they have a strong precedent to follow. And they rub their hands with glee as they remark on how they plan to exceed it…

All I can say is that I’m glad we have a week to recover (hopefully) before diving into the next sequence.

Right now, however, I need to get this presentation finished…

So a bunch of people are supposed to come by all the apartments in Talponia on Wednesday to inspect the rooms for tax purposes. Apparently, in Italy your taxes are determined by such things as how many bathrooms and windows you have in your house. I think the “rationale” is that the more windows and bathrooms you have, the richer you are, and therefore the more tax you can afford to pay.

I’m rather speechless in the face of such powerful logic, but I’ll say this much: I feel sorry for anyone with a greenhouse!