The Faculty Blog @ IIT Institute of Design

ID student paper accepted to DIS2012

 

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A team of IIT Institute of Design graduate students (David Kodinsky, Tuduyen Annie Nguyen, Will Skelton, Parminder Kaur, Yu Yin) recently had their research paper accepted to the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2012). DIS is a premier arena for designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers to come together, debate, and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice. As part of my Fall 2011 Communication Design Workshop, and supported by Santosh Basapur at Motorola Mobility, this student team designed and prototyped a public interactive installation at the Design Research Conference 2011 to explore the use of gaming in encourage philanthropic giving. The accepted paper was peer reviewed; out of 449 papers submitted, only 89 were accepted in a double blind review (less than 20%).

David Kodinsky (who starts at IA Collaborative this Fall), and Tuduyen Annie Nguyen will be presenting the paper at DIS2012 in June at Newcastle, UK. Please join us if you are planning to attend the conference.

Creationstorming: a contrasting method to Brainstorming

via labs.teague.com

Creationstorming is a method conjured up by Teague Labs that contrasts with open Brainstorming. Its is a mechanism by which teams can quickly come up with ideas around very specific topic area. The key word here is QUICK!

One of the things I like about Creationstorming are the rules:

1. There are bad ideas.
It’s okay to disagree with an idea. Encourage critical debate: challenge others, defend yourself. Wild ideas are welcome, but be prepared to back them up.

2. One idea to rule them all.
Keep the focus on building one solid idea that progresses. Ideas can fork and merge, but don’t lose sight of the goal for the session.

3. Time is short. Think fast, talk faster.
Sessions should be kept as short as possible, so be on your toes and be concise. Interrupt long-winded digressions to keep things on track.

Martin Thaler, my officemate and Associate Professor at ID, calls it 'focused brainstorms', suggesting that free for all brainstorms sometimes lead nowhere!

ID designed Art Loop Open opens its doors to the public

Art Loop Open is an innovative city-wide art exhibition designed with the intention of mobilizing the general public to engage with art, artists and each other. Modeled on the very successful ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan, ALO had 200 unique pieces of art juried and exhibited across 13 different venues in the city of Chicago. The venues were selected from the 200+ merchants in the Loop district of Chicago and included high profile stations such as Macy’s Flagship Store, the historic Palmer House Hotel, the Burnham Hotel, the Hard Rock Hotel, Merchandise Mart, among others.

The organizers of the event, the Chicago Loop Alliance, and the Chicago Artists Coalition worked closely with the IIT Institute of Design to plan and implement the experience design for ALO. The period of design for ALO was about 6 months, from beginning (when the project was announced) to end (period of the exhibition). Most of the planning process was conducted during the summer months (June, July, August) in a team of 4 graduate students led by Anijo Mathew.

This is an exciting project which allowed us to develop a reasonably complex interactive user experience using ID methods, tools and most importantly early prototyping.

You can see and vote at Art Loop Open from Oct 15-29. Hub37, which is the centerstage of the event is located at Block 37 (108 North State Street).  

How fidelity effects prototyping

Kim Erwin pointed me to this interesting article on prototyping. The article points to a very interesting discussion about fidelity. Take a peek -

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/integrating