On Tuesday November 2, we went over the scenarios made by each group. Some of the examples created were excellent. Here I include some of the comments brought up during the session.
The first group that presented, Suse, Heikki, Kalle, Tapio, Palas and Jian, proposed a voice-to-text concept that would simplify the process of interaction. The graphics were beautifully realized. The scenario itself needed more details, with respect to system interaction and in the presentation, the group needed to sound more convincing.
The second group, that included Forrest, Vuokko, Ferhat, and John presented us “Bridging the Generation Gap”, a Brief Analysis of 3 potential user groups, and 3 potential technologies as well as a video scenario. With respect to the Brief Analysis, it was commented that because of the large amounts of text, the visual presentation of these materials was not effective. The video scenario, however, was a total success in how it showed clearly the patterns of interaction of story collection with a voice-driven interface.
The third group that presented, “A Christmas to Remember”, included Dipti, Juho, Satoko, Jaakko and Mikko. They have already done some user interview, with members of their families and presented an excellent rendition of potential interaction with an internet-based story collection system. This scenario included 1) a memorable title that immediately contextualized the work 2) Used clearly defined persona’s 3) Clearly rendered the user interface and tasks being performed from a 3D perspective so that we were able to see the foreground (the functions that the user was accessing to complete tasks) as well as the background.
The fourth group that presented included Jussi, Lauri, Minka, Markus,
and Matti. This group showed us an interesting scenario featuring a multi-cultural family that is split between Finland and Argentina. The scenario, that was beautifully rendered, showed an understanding of the problematic of the users in maintaining their ties to 2 different cultures. It could have focused more closely on the system details.
The fifth group that included Outi, Helena, Tapio, Björn, Minna and Reina gave a very good rendition of a story collection system, “Elsa in Epooq Land”, grounded in real life institutions, such as libraries. It also provided with convincing insights about the feasibility of future products such as memory books.
Next week we will have Merja Helle, who is a researcher at the Department of Media as guest speaker. Merja will give us a presentation about “Fieldwork”, what it means, how to do it, and some insights.
During the next few weeks, you will be required to create questionnaires that allow you to perform some fieldwork and enable you to get an understanding of how people might respond to the design that you have developed in your scenarios.
Below I list interesting sites that have a lot of good information about How to go about making a questionnaire. Please look through these.
University of Leeds, Guide to the design of questionnaires
University of Loughborough, Questionnaire design
Usability.gov
WAI Site Usability Testing Questions
November 7, 2010 at 10:54 am | General, Design | No comment
As everyone should be aware, we are not meeting again until Nov. 2, when you should have your scenarios ready for presentation to Oppifi. In order to help you with this task. I post below the slides from the presentation about Scenario-based Design.
I remind you briefly that you are now organized into teams, where each individual brings diverse skills as well as interests. Below, I also include the list with the names of the participants for each team. Contact me, Asap, if your name is not in any of these lists and you still need to find a group that you can work with.
So that you can organize your time better, I also post the Calendar of Activities for the semester. Please note that workshop activities are being planned for Friday Nov. 19 and Nov. 26, from 12-16 hours. These workshops will be an opportunity for you to learn about using UML basics in order to model interaction. More information about this activity is coming soon!
Scenario-based Design slides
Teams list
Activities
October 19, 2010 at 12:59 pm | General, Design | No comment
In this presentation we discuss the ways in which you “look” at the world as a researcher. A basic rule is that you cannot take what you see at face value. You must dig deeper. And then sometimes you need to look at things in a skewed sort of way or what I call a “diffracted” perspective.
This way of looking allows you to appreciate how the artifacts (tools) that we create mediate between us and the tasks that we realize in our activities. Artifacts and tools in turn have an effect in how we perform actions and tasks (e.g. they enable or constrain us in particular ways).
Slides:
Oppifi slides
Lily’s presentation
Calendar of activities
Design brief instructions
October 6, 2010 at 1:50 pm | General, Design | No comment
Language is a representational system. Language enables us to construct meanings. In language we use symbols to stand for or represent to other people our concepts, ideas and feelings. It is also a trans-modal medium through which we make sense of things.
Lily’s presentation slides
October 4, 2010 at 7:57 pm | General, Design | No comment
Research in design aims to obtain knowledge in order to design highly targeted media objects that address the needs and desires of the audiences that they are intended for. Research in design considers the impact that design products have in the world. Research in design aims to develop sustainable products.
Lily’s presentation slides
October 4, 2010 at 7:37 pm | General, Design | No comment
Here is a quite sardonic description about the road to catastrophe, drawing from the experience suffered by Russian citizens after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Check it out! Orlov Five Stages
February 8, 2009 at 11:41 am | General, Anthropology | No comment
Learning something new is a good way to begin the year. So, from to January 5-9, I participated in the intensive workshop about physical computing at the School of Arts and Communication, K3 of the University of Malmö, Sweden. Malmö is a small and friendly city in the southern part of the country. It is a twenty minute train ride from Copenhagen.
David Cuartielles, David Sjunnesson, and other members of the Arduino team taught the course that entailed working with a diversity of software and hardware components, such as Processing, Pure Data, Arduino and XBee.
Here is a project that i realized during the 3rd day. It is a 5X4 matrix of LEDs connected in parallel to simulate a screen and an accelerometer used to sense changes in the position of the device. If the board is tilted sideways or upwards, the LEDs on that side will react by lighting up one by one. The matrix is connected to my computer via an Arduino board.
The course was a great experience and served as an introduction to this new area in computing and design. Getting over the usual thinking and conceptualizing design in terms of the screen was initially difficult. Once you are past that hangup, all sorts of possibilities open up.
I also had the opportunity of listening to a lecture by Durrell Bishop at the Copenhagen Institute of Design. Durell is a principal at LuckyByte, a product design firm based in the UK and tutor at the Royal College of Art. He spoke, among other things about the “physicalisation” of computing artifacts. Is it worthwhile to physicalise something? Why? How?
He also urged the students to think in terms of the properties of objects, since this strategy can be used to design behavior. This last point, reminded me of how, in the design research seminar at Media Lab, we use a modified version of the artifact analysis method in order to tease out the properties of artifacts/object. Check out his sketch where he presents a re-thinking of the artifacts used when interacting with a stream of video. The sketches also made me think of the work we did with performative research and scenarios for the HandsOn project.
Here is yet another sketch where he presents the difference between everyday interaction with objects in the physical world, and potential interaction via, presumably digital, button based mechanisms.
After the lecture, we went to a nearby watering hole for beer and tea. In the picture, from left to right: Heather Martin (our hostess from CID), Durrell Bishop, Fernando L. Barrajón and David Sjunnesson (from 1Scale1).
January 12, 2009 at 7:43 am | General, Design | No comment
Se pudiese decir que la historia de Syvia Rexach ( 1922-1961) en Puerto Rico es similar a la de Badding. Una increíble compositora y poetisa puertorriqueña quien escribió canciones que hoy se consideran clásicas. Encontré un vídeo de Las Caribelles - un grupo vocal de cuatro chicas fabulosas - cantando un medley de las canciones de Sylvia. El final incluye unas lineas de su famosa composición, Olas y arena. (Si quieres saber más sobre Las Caribelles, pincha aquí.)
December 28, 2008 at 10:36 pm | General, Art, America | No comment
Bueno, me he pasado los últimos días escuchando la música de este cantante finlandés, Rauli Badding (1947-1987) que era fantástico y el cual desgraciadamente murió jovencito. Buscando en la red, me he encontrado esta versión en inglés de su canción Valot (Luces). ¡Gozenla!
December 28, 2008 at 9:56 pm | General, Art | No comment
What a week! On Wednesday, Dec 10, I attended Paul Kahn’s lecture on Managing Everything: a new vision of the Digital Library. The lecture dealt with how the emergence of music - video - photo sharing sites, growing collections of digital books, national media archives and collaborative work spaces offer us a vision of a Digital Library in search of a user interface.
The lecture was part of Paul’s application for a docentureship at the Media Lab Helsinki. For the past few years Paul, who is An American Living in Paris, has been teaching information architecture at the University of Art and Design Helsinki.
On Thursday evening I had the good fortune, through the kindness of my colleague Mika Tuomola, to be invited to a performance of Kristiina Elstela and Juusi Tuurna’s cabaret act at Manari. You can see more information About the Performance here. It is a wonderful act and I thoroughly recommend it to everybody. You do not need to know Finnish to appreciate the talent of these two performers.
On Friday, the Media Lab Helsinki hosted the public defense of Koray Tahiroglu’s dissertation on Interactive Music Systems. The event, the featured Prof. Robert Rowe from the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University as Opponent. Here is a picture from our gathering after the karonkka at Belge’s kabinetti.
December 14, 2008 at 12:35 am | General | No comment