Mette Ramsgard Thomsen is an architect working with interactive technologies. Her research centres on the design of spaces that are defined by physical as well as digital dimensions. Through a focus on intelligent programming and ideas of emergence she explores how computational logics can lead to new spatial concepts.

Mette is Head of CITA - an innovative research environment exploring the emergent intersections between architecture and digital technologies. Identifying core research questions into how space and technology can be probed, CITA seeks to investigate how the current forming of a digital culture impacts on architectural thinking and practice.

Biography

where: The Auditorium, Stranboulevarden 47, Østerbro 2100
when: 5-6pm. Monday, May 5th, 2010

If you can’t find the room, please call Alie 20905005

The Art of Doing - A reflective investigation regarding group dynamics and how to get the project done.

Nicholas Wakeham (b.1975) is a creative producer, screenwriter and filmmaker. He has worked within the creative field for 13 years on both a national and international level. In his lecture The Art of Doing, Nicholas Wakeham shares his thoughts and ideas concerning project management, creating a team, group dynamics and how to work effectively but at the same time seeing the true process.

Educated at Malmö University, Stockholm Filmschool and Broby Grafiska. Nicholas Wakeham is currently a creative producer at www.varelsen.com i Malmö, Sweden.

where: (Room TBC), Stranboulevarden 47, Østerbro 2100
when: 5-6pm. Weds May 5th, 2010

If you can’t find the room, please call Alie 20905005

Service Design Prototyping

live|work is a unique multi-disciplinary team of designers, technologists, social anthropologists, marketeers, management consultants, operations professionals and entrepreneurs who bring an experienced, pragmatic, rigorous and passionate approach to the development of new breakthrough service propositions for clients.

Senior Service Designer, John Holager will present some of his current thinking on the discipline and this lecture will be more of a colloborative discussion rather than a monologue.

Biography

where: The Auditorium, Stranboulevarden 47, Østerbro 2100
when: 5-6pm. Weds March 17th, 2010

If you can’t find the room, please call Alie 20905005

One of their really great offerings to the design environment outside the institute is their open lecture programme. Each year CIID invite prominent people from their extensive international network to come to Copenhagen and teach at their courses – and give open lectures while they are here anyway. The list of previous and upcoming speakers is long (you will find my name on it twice…) and they just added the next coming three lectures this spring: Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, Nicholas Wakeham and John Holager. While I only know Mette from the distance through her work at CITA, I have had the pleasure of working with both Nicholas and John previously.

A couple of years ago my company Move worked with Live|Work on a service design project for the pension company PFA. John is working as a senior service designer with Live|Work and during the project we did a joined workshop at their offices in Oslo. On a warm sunny day in June we had a great time discussing and producing experience prototypes for PFA’s clients to test and give feedback on the new service. John is still with Live|Work and on March 17 he will present some of his current thinking on the discipline of service design.

Posted by Jesper Pagh - read his full article here: http://blogs.denmark.dk/

Talk to It
The uniform stores the time and place of each entry while prerecorded video messages can be set to start automatically when the dog reaches its geolocated destination, such as a refugee camp.

Go Forth, Little Doggie
These pooches would serve as furry couriers and provide invaluable assistance after disaster strikes — what’s your take on this concept item?

Posted on: http://www.petsugar.com

Small Interactions from Ishac Bertran on Vimeo.

Small Interactions captured at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.

Footage and Edition: Ishac Bertran
Music: Four Tet - Love Cry

Posted on: http://www.inhabitat.com

Tentatively termed as “This is a Journey into Sound”, the project from DKDS is actually a demo version of RHIFID based speaker control system which will groove to need of specific user. It means that two speakers will serve the same number of users by playing their fav songs separately, unlike now when all the speakers played the same music for all audience. Likewise, in its final form, the system might serve as many users individually as the number of speakers attached to it.

What the heck? You might be wondering “how this is even possible”. In fact, the system uses an effective integration of RFID technology and processing with Adruino, to form a music system wherein the speakers serve as location aware controllers, allowing user to interact with music and the environment by moving the speakers around the RFID tags.

Here is the process of how it gets done. First of all, a grid of RFID tags is formed. RFID tags are actually mapped with the songs on individual basis. For Example the most popular song of the specific decade and particular genre is assigned to each RFID tag. Expect more options to be available in the improved version, whereby you can select the fav songs for each RFID tags. This grid covers the area which becomes the range of the speakers. As speakers are moved around the grid, the specific RFID tag instruct the music system via speakers to play the song fed on to it and thus the user gets to listen what was fed on the nearby RFID tag.

The fun does not stop here. Think when more speakers than two (current capacity) can be joined together into the system which will let five users listen songs of their choice through five speakers, separately. And if this was not enough, speakers can form a group to produce the combined playback of all songs fed on the respective RFID tags, taking experience to creative heights!

RFID tags can also be adjusted in the light of samples, pitch and other sound effects. This is just the prototype of what can be done to explore the music system’s true potential.

So how do you feel about it and would you love to go for purchasing such a system when available in market in future? Or do you have some suggestions? Lets discuss them in the comments!

More of such intriguing stuff is available to explore in the form of Ritmo Baby Speakers and a multi-functional iPod Dock, Sherwood INET 2.0. See you.

Posted on: http://www.walyou.com

It seems that the entire world is speculating on the future these days. (For a critical reflection on this phenomenon, the Dutchies among us should read this.) From this perspective, Nokia organized a design course around the question ‘What might the future of phones look like?’. This question is relevant, as every mobile phone manufacturer currently seems to be rashly copying Apple’s shiny iPhone OS interface and information organization, while real innovations still derive from thinking differently, ‘out of the box’.

After some intense user research, the team around Little World found out that the massive overload of features in modern phones was actually pushing away the human element in it — making interactions between people easier. Therefore the two designers explored new ways of grouping, messaging and organizing contacts, approaching these issues from an intuitive way. Little World creates “a more intuitive virtual world from which you can manage friends and contacts as opposed to the generic and alphabetically ordered lists we are used to today”, and according to Cannon it “allows you to group people in a natural, analog way, placing your work colleagues in a different area to your football mates, and using your phone in a more natural, subtle and playful way”.

Little World is built around three themes. First, the interface is people-centric. Second, it aims to allow for more subtle, non-verbal mode of communication, instead of only ‘active’ communication such as texting or talking. And third, Little World is built upon the principle of playfulness: “People naturally play, fiddle, fidget, doodle with pens, pencils, cords, bottle labels, so why not allow that type of behaviour to exist in the phone itself?” In the video you will notice that although the organization of information has the potential to work more intuitively, actions such as adding people to your contacts and dragging them around as well as sending out messages are still time-consuming matters. Nevertheless, the interface design itself is beautiful and even cozy. Little World was a finalist at the IxD10 student competition. Click here for some more information about the project.

In case you’re interested to see more fresh user interfaces for mobile phones, you should definitely check out the Swedish company TAT. Their YouTube channel features plenty of interesting UI concepts, such as ‘Juggle UI’. A very interesting interface is TAT’s ‘Abstract UI’, in which “we go from very precise information to the idle screen as an entity, an abstract map of information. The idle screen will paint and evolve during the day and once you’ve learned its language you will get a whole lot of information just by giving it a glance”.

Posted by By Jeroen Beekmans on http://popupcity.net

The booth actually uses a hair dryer helmet to do the function. Quite an innovation that left me speechless! How could one use a hair dryer to make a phone call?

The guys hacked the Arduino circuits on to an old hair dryer and applied their scientific knowledge to integrate it with a chair to produce what we know as “Comet Phone Booth”. Something called magic booth for simple minds!

Let’s discuss the process. By default, the device remains in standby mode but once the user sits on the chair and puts on the helmet, a red light glows up signaling that ‘it is in use’ and guides the user to make a phone call. The user keys in the number using a hefty keypad (shown below) that comes along with it. Rest of the process is invisible but the outcome is not. The desired call gets placed for conversation to follow.

The helmet serves to you the incoming voice of the person you are talking to and the microphone placed inside captures your voice to be sent over. Once the conversation is over, users leaves the chair and the booth goes back to stand-by mode.

The big thing is that the booth is movable meaning we may soon see a telephone booth in its portable version. It would be great to see the booths being moved to the location where the potential users are, like to a sports stadium when the public is going on or coming out of. Same applies to the cinema halls. Surely, you found other uses. Lets hear them in comments.

Posted on: http://www.walyou.com