The Faculty Blog @ IIT Institute of Design

ID student installations for the City of Chicago up and running

This semester my Interactive Media Workshop is working with the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events to develop interactive placemaking probes for the City's 2012 Cultural Plan initiative. Three student teams in the class were asked to design interactive interventions, which will allow the common citizen to express their point of view about culture and engage with other citizens, both synchronously in place and asynchronously. The teams have conducted research, conceived, prototyped, and implemented  three different interactive prototypes located in cultural hubs around selected neighborhoods - one at the Old Town School of Folk Music, another in Pilsen/National Museum of Mexican Art, and the third at Chicago's City Hall. Over the next two weeks, the teams will monitor interaction to capture user information at these hubs. 

If you are in Chicago, please visit these sites and see the high quality installations that ID students have completed for the city and add to the research by participating. Here are some photos of the projects being set up/launching.

Note: PUSH is a mobile installation that is moving around the city. There will be an exhibit/event at the National Museum of Mexican Art when the devices come back - more information about this will be posted soon.

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The three teams are:

SkyWords (at the City Hall)
Lauren Braun, Kareem Hindi, Lee Lin, Jose Mello, Jaime Rivera

The City Listens (at the Old Town School of Folk Music)
Jorge Angarita, Paul Keck, Leticia Baiao, Jennifer Gzesh

Push (at Pilsen/National Museum of Mexican Art)
Janice Wong, Philipp Bohm, John Shin, Nathaniel Jiang

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Google's Project Glass vs. Nokia's Future Vision; why Google has it right...

By now, you must have seen Google's Project Glass video showing the future of wearable AR technology. As expected the blogosphere is abuzz with excitement, scepticism, and mockery of the concept. Some are even calling Nokia one of the first in augmented reality glasses, take this Giz post for example - "I Liked The Google Glasses Video Better In 2009 When Nokia Made It". Wearable AR has been around for many many years. See this Atlantic article which talks about MIT Media Lab technology that is 13 years old showing wearables. In fact the cyborg Steve Mann [who I have seen in person in 2002] has been wearing AR glasses for years before Nokia or Google envisioned it. ID Professor Tom MacTavish remembers a time when he met Steve Mann at a conference - once he recognised who Tom was, he pulled out a log of the last time they had met, using that as a way to start the conversation. Tom felt unequipped to match this sort of augmentation of human memory!

What makes Project Glass [the right way to say it] compelling is that it uses mature voice recognition technology, real location based prompts, and contextual computing to describe its concept. This is no longer science fiction, nor does it reside purely in engineering labs' future vision videos. This is real technology that will be on the street soon. Google co-founder Sergey Brin was seen wearing one of these at a recent event. Sure Google may mess it up, maybe their actual product may not be that compelling. But by doing it first, Google paves the way for future designers and engineers to come up with technology that will work. Wearables is where AR will shine in the future, and Google is on the right path...

[posted first on www.anijomathew.posterous.com]

 

Prototyping for the City of Chicago

This semester my workshop is working with the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) to help with the planning of the City's 2012 Cultural Plan. The 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan will provide insights on how to elevate the City as a global destination for creativity, innovation and excellence in the arts. The focus of the project will be to further build on Chicago’s vast cultural assets and vibrant community, established through the collaborative partnerships formed with the public and private sectors and civic community. Public engagement will play a key role in shaping Chicago’s cultural future.

Three student teams from the workshop will conduct user research, design, and deploy three placemaking prototypes in cultural hubs in selected neighborhoods, one at the Old Town School of Folk Music, another at the National Museum of Mexican Art/Pilsen neighbourhood, and the third at City Hall. The teams will deploy these prototypes in April-May, 2012 as well as monitor the prototypes to capture user information at these hubs. At the end of the project, these experiential located and portable prototypes will help DCASE augment traditional forms of research by listening to the voice of a larger diversity of Chicagoans as they move through their everyday lives.

Here are some pics from the mid term review of these prototypes. Keep in mind that these are still works in progress, and may or may not resemble the final installs. In these pictures you can see Jewel Malone, the Deputy Commissioner of Cultural Affairs; Julie Burros the Director of Cultural Planning; Ann Hickey, Director of Program Development; and Juana Guzman, the Vice President of the National Museum of Mexican Art.

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PSFK's Future of Mobile Tagging profiles IIT ID project

PSFK recently released a new report called the "Future of Mobile Tagging". Art Loop Open, an IIT ID designed project in the Chicago Loop is profiled as one of the projects in this report. An IIT ID team developed and implemented the experience design for Art Loop Open.

You can see the report here - (the project is profiled on page 76).

StreetMuseum: Augmented Reality on the streets of London

via gizmodo.com

Eerily similar to a project done by my students in the Interactive Media Workshop...a great implementation of AR technology in the city.

StreetMuseum mashes Google Maps and geo-tagged content to generate interesting locative media. Such intersections of technology, architecture, and urban space is a very exciting direction for interactive technology and media. Imagine what this will do for learning!

Interaction Design and Robotics come together in an Asimov Future

via gizmodo.com

Sexy beautiful knee high robots and moving interactive walls to traverse through architectural space? What a wonderful idea!

Hand from Above Chris O'Shea

via vimeo.com

This is a spatial installation that has been getting a lot of press recently. Its really engaging but not interactive - a distinction that is not common in many computing installations.

You can see more about the project at Chris O'Shea's website.

Prototyping Workshops @ ID

As part of ID's prototyping initiative, we organised two prototyping workshops at ID this semester.

One, called Sketching with Hardware, was led by Dave Vondle, an Interaction Designer from IDEO Chicago. See what the New Idiom had to say about Dave's workshop here.

The other, Rapid Prototyping, was led by Oscar Murillo, Senior User Experience Designer working for Microsoft’s Strategic Prototyping group. Here is New Idiom's take on Oscar's workshop. You can also see Oscar's lecturette at ID's Vimeo channel {part 1 and part 2}

Second Skin - a movie about Second Life

via www.youtube.com

My students presented this in the Interactive Environments class. It points to how interactive and virtual technologies have deep social and cultural extensions into our lives.

{thanks Nikki, Libby, Eunkyung, Seth}