Team Lumen workstation and the flag of Cambodia
I enjoyed reading the blog of Team Lumen tonight. Team Lumen is a group of four Industrial Design students from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who a working on a (thesis?) project to develop an affordable and quality lighting solution for people in rural Cambodia. As you know, because of my experience in Cambodia last year, I am always interested to hear about what people are doing to address the needs of Khmer people, especially when it involves students and sustainable technology! But what I find really relevant is Team Lumen’s blog which they have been updating since they first flew to Phnom Penh last April. During that time they have shared many great photos, notes and videos about the evolution of their project and their process as a team — insights from user testing, first hand observations and facts about life in rural Cambodia, concept development (which they let people vote on through their blog!), prototyping, etc…
What they finally developed is called the MoonLight, a portable, solar powered lamp designed to be assembled locally. Thanks to a few awards they picked up and a partnership with Kamworks (a solar energy company in Cambodia!), it looks like this student project may reach the people of Cambodia. Well done and thanks for the inspiration!
Screenshot of Worlds Top Tourist Destinations
The last week of our Interactive Data Visualization course was spent working on a final project using Adobe Flash and a UN Data Set of our choice. Working together with Mimi Son, we chose a data set from the UN’s World Tourism Organization and created a visualization that examines the region of origin of tourists in the world’s 10 most visited countries for 2005.
Click here to launch the application in a new window
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Shots from the homemade photo booth at the CIID Christmas Party
Tomorrow starts the last week of class before I head back to New York for Christmas. You know you are at a pretty good school when your choice of classes for that week are “Crafting Interactive Spaces” led by James Tichenor and Joshua Walton of the Interaction Lab at Rockwell Group and a workshop led by Yaniv Steiner that is about creating next generation toys. What to choose???
My bookmarks from the past week:
PhotoCaring mockup
As context for the Graphical User Interfaces course, we used the elderly home insights we discovered in our User Research course for developing concepts for the GUI final project. Why elderly homes? As the course syllabus explains:
Creating a concept with an application specific GUI for an eldercare context with multiple user groups (patients, doctors, nurses and visitors) with their respective information needs represents an interesting basis for the students to create highly tailored and relevant interfaces for a demanding target group. The students will have to develop, design and prototype tools and experiences that have impact and show empathy towards the different user groups needs and contexts.
After a lengthy and intensive concept development process and user testing at the elderly home, Jacob, Ash and I presented PhotoCaring for our final presentation.
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“With the stock market in turmoil and housing in a slump, appliance manufacturers are taking the long view and retooling their offerings for aging baby boomers.” Wall Street Journal
Thankfully we did not have to go this far for our project dealing with elderly. But it looks like a fun day at the office.
Via Core77
My bookmarks from the past week:
- Interaction, Software, and Service Design — Dubberly Design Office
- Concept Design Tools - Digital Web Magazine
“Designers of digital products and services like ourselves can dramatically improve our work by generating more concepts early in our projects. In this article, I’ll try to make concept design easier to learn by illustrating three simple tools for generating concepts. “
- The Specials On BBC “Arena” / търсене
Cool! A BBC documentary about The Specials from the 80’s. Hosted on some Russian site.
- Interaction Lab at Rockwell Group
- Putting people first » The many futures of our digital lives
“In her inaugural public lecture as Adelaide’s Thinker in Residence, Intel’s Genevieve Bell will explore how digital technology is shaping our lives, our culture, and our future.” Download MP3
- Data Visualization and Infographics - Smashing Magazine
Data visualization and infographics inspiration from Smashing Magazine
- UNdata
“internet-based data service for the global user community” by the United Nations
- DISK/club transmediale: Festival 09
Berlin, anyone?
- You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy? - NYTimes.com
- 28 Reasons to Bike
- Gallery | inspireUX - words to inspire user experience designers
Download and print “quotes from people who truly understand the importance of a positive user experience.”
- The Extraordinaries
“The Extraordinaries turns spare time into social good by delivering volunteer opportunities, on-demand, to mobile phones, which can be performed on mobile phones in 20 minutes or less.”
- MAKE: Blog: Open source hardware 2008 - The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2008
The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2008
