This book is a travel guide. A travel guide to the edge of what humans can think. We'll cover different ways of how humans approach this edge, from different disciplines, and also develop some helpful mental imagery to make navigating this particular area of thinking easier.
of children and families is complex and often shaped by uncertainty. Depressive moods are not uncommon and can make these situations even more difficult.
This is where STARK wants to help. It creates spaces where emotions are welcome and where self-efficacy, confidence, and joy can be felt. STARK is a reliable companion for children in challenging situations. Dealing with thoughts and feelings is made easier through play: the STARK system enables self-care, growth, and connection.
Wouldn't it be great if we could maintain the connectedness with our loved ones through game nights? In this project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), our consortium investigates how playfulness can be made accessible over a distance.
Through innovative sensor technology, novel interfaces and an agile, user-centered design process, we're shaping a new way of playing over a distance.
many people shy away from: they fear being wrong about the meaning behind a piece. It really shouldn't be that way, which is why I started Krickelkrackel. This art project emphasizes the complete freedom of the beholder to decide what a piece of art means to them. Every painting in the series is irrevocably marked with a stamped, signed declaration: “Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht.” Or, in English: “When painting this picture, I had nothing in mind.”
for everyone. Unfortunately, visitor numbers and demographics increasingly indicate that especially people of younger ages feel excluded and not adequately addressed by current museum culture.
In this project, our students conduced a participatory design research project conducted together with the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany. They set out to create new ways of making museums more accessible to people who would or could not otherwise attend them. The results include three novel approaches of integrating diverse educational and participatory concepts into the museum visit.
These include “ArtMate”, a new way of discovering people with whom to attend the museum, “myndmap” a new way of contributing remotely to a collaborative exhibit and “NewMuseum” a new way of connecting school classes to prepare jointly for a visit to the museum, including a digital co-curation process.
our students set out to design new ways of preparing for one’s own death, of remembering loved ones
and of joining others in grief. For example, Jana Horst's project, “Memo,” is a pillow with the support of which one can play the voices of loved ones. Tom Sion's project, “Human Remains,” is an hourglass with human ashes. Alexander Görts developed “Shards”, an additive memorial for collective mourning, So Jeong Park “LiebeBox” a craft sheet from which a set of nested gift boxes can be folded. These make it possible to remain present in the life of a loved one even after one's own death.
But that shouldn’t have to mean becoming lonely. In this project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), our consortium investigated how virtual memories – such as family photo albums or 3D data of former holiday destinations – can be made accessible to people living in retirement homes, remotely connecting them with their relatives.
Through innovative sensor technology, an intuitive interface concept and an agile, user-centered design process, we shaped a new way of interacting with the past.
what makes us human. But aren’t we putting our creative potential at risk when we lose ourselves in often meaningless mobile communication? With this project, we decided to turn things around and create a chatbot that functions as a personal trainer for the user’s creativity.
Creactivities includes a variety of workouts, challenges and programs, designed to exercise the different areas of the creative muscle: vision, empathy, imagination and critique.
when it comes to local initiatives? For this project, we developed a public installation featuring a window-drawing robot that marks votes next to hashtags representing local issues. Every social media post using one of the multilingual hashtags casts a vote. In the background, a 3D map projection visualizes the initiatives on a styrofoam miniature of the neighborhood.
While studying complex systems is often daunting, discovering them via a game is something else entirely, encouraging role play, exploration and even changing points of view. Games foster collaboration, as well as a competitive spirit.
With this project, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, the Industrial Design students at the University of Wuppertal developed a series of board games – each focused on teaching one aspect of foreign policy.
All games can be downloaded as »print-and-play« variants from the project website. The students also published the source files of their projects under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0) license.
surround us are equipped with increasing computational power, a capacity increasingly described as »artificial intelligence.« What if such an intelligence could also entail the ability to anticipate future situations – and fear them? In this project, our students Gina-Vanessa Lohkamp, Gürkan Orak and Alexander Salice took on this question and designed speculative devices that visualize such a scenario – through devices that make scarce resources perceptible.
Catholic rituals provide interesting approaches for making the intangible tangible. For this project, our students redesigned the most fundamental of these rituals – fasting, confession and prayer, amongst others – for the 21st century. Without altering the underlying belief system, the results provide a fresh take on how reflection and mindfulness can be designed.
of our Industrial Design students at the University of Wuppertal — Piet Becker, Alexander Görts, David Hrlic, David von Netzer and Christopher J. Weld — designed a fictional, dystopian future society in which courtrooms and parliaments have been replaced by computers. They created a silent film, aicracy, featuring a series of everyday objects from this society, and portrayed the lives of two of its citizens: a productive one and a lazy one.
and having a good time with friends don't have to be at odds. Escape Team is a project I'm developing with Sarah, my wife: a printable escape game. The accompanying app creates the atmosphere (via audio narration and a thrilling soundtrack) and also serves as the game master, checking the entered codes while keeping the clock ticking.
It's great to see how the game is received and critically acclaimed – and how many people use its Mission Editor to create missions themselves for fun, business and education.
be transformed into an experience? There is often a chasm between thinking and feeling. To feel, we need different stimuli. In this project, our Industrial Design students at the University of Wuppertal — Linda von Faber, Felix Fastenrath, Friedrich Kegel, Julia Lakemeinen, Eva Licht and Yannik Wendt — took on this topic and developed new possibilities for interacting with data in physical or emotional ways.
artificial intelligence change the creative process? Five of our Industrial Design students at the University of Wuppertal – Elizabeth Bradford, Erik Caetano, Friedrich Kegel, Eva Licht and Marco Höwer – reimagined what creative work might look like in a future where artificial intelligence is omnipresent. The end result was prototypes of objects that could be part of a creative laboratory of the future.
a new approach to delivering presentations: no clicker, no slides. Instead, the presenter wears a pair of smart, NFC-enabled rings that gives them intuitive, physical control of their presentation.
By moving across a sensor-equipped stage, the DataTouch wearer goes through each presentation topic step by step – literally. A tracker maps their position on stage to different points within each topic, so they can be approached, walked through or skipped with physical gestures. The presenter can also activate – or pick up – presentation topics by picking up NFC-tagged objects that will be recognized by the DataTouch rings.
The presenter gains the ability to embody their talk and improvise in the moment, rather than memorizing and sticking to a strict presentation sequence.
investigated the concept of embodiment in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) via the concept of Research Through Design (RTD). The notion of embodiment has many meanings in HCI. With my thesis, titled Encountering the Digital: Representational and Experiential Embodiment in Tangible User Interfaces, my aim was to contribute to the clarification of the term.
I proposed a distinction between two major meanings: embodiment in the sense of representation, and embodiment in the sense of how the experience of one’s socio-physical world is fundamentally grounded in having a living body. I named these two meanings representational embodiment and experiential embodiment.
Having distinguished between the two meanings, I then looked at the moments in which they occur: moments in which embodied users face embodiments of digital information. These moments are a central aspect of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs), which are often concerned with making digital information graspable. Focusing on TUIs, I pursued the question of how the design of the representational embodiments of digital information affects the user’s experience.
Research Through Design (RTD) is a research concept that promises to offer a new, »designerly« perspective on a subject. There are different approaches to RTD, of which I chose Findeli’s model of Project-Grounded Research (PGR). I transformed my research question into a design question, namely how embodiments of digital information could be designed in a way that is oriented to the users’ embodiment.
In everyday language, physical (e. g. disk size, data mining) and social metaphors (smart phone, battery life) are often used to describe concepts of interaction with digital information. These metaphors formed the starting point of my investigation into TUIs that make digital information graspable through socio-physical manifestations — through shape change, weight shift and life-like signals. I produced a comparative study of three mobile phone prototypes and three vibration-based comparison prototypes, which found that interaction with the Shape-Changing Mobile, Weight-Shifting Mobile and Ambient Life prototypes was experienced by the users as novel and interesting, but at times also as irritating and even annoying. The mixed results from this study can be described as two-sided coins: the interaction with the prototypes was rated as rich in associations, but requiring prior knowledge and, at times, disappointing.
I concluded that the encounter of representational embodiment and experiential embodiment can open a conceptual space for interaction design that is rich in opportunities, but also rich in challenges.
interact with technology that can communicate body language? This project explored a future vision of shape-changing devices that actively use body language to express relational aspects of the interaction. The devices react to different users, spaces and situations, with behavior ranging from shy to curious.
For example, imagine your phone could demonstrate excitement to see you. Or annoyance that you’re bothering it again. Which leads into the much bigger question: What kind of relationship do we want to have with the technology we use?
Watch my talk at TEDxBerlin to learn more about my research into the issue.
use eating-related metaphors for information consumption: information diet, eye candy, news feed. Our body simply understands the parallel between consuming information and consuming food.
The fast food explosion of the 1990s changed our relationship to food: Cheap, mass-produced and widely available, we stuffed it down without a second thought. The way I see it, we’re currently in the fast-food age of information consumption. Information is almost ubiquitously available, and irresistibly tempting. We gorge, only to find ourselves hungry for more after just a few minutes – and our hand reaches for the phone again.
Perhaps we can learn from our eating culture once again, taking a cue from conscientious, selective approaches to food – vegetarian and vegan eating, for example – and questioning the provenance of what we consume: Where does this come from? What’s in it? What will it do to me?
In this project, conceptual devices for information consumption were developed, showing us how we could consume information in the future.
can be a great way to produce haptic output from mobile phones. This project investigated the use of gyroscopic flywheels, or spinning tops, to do just that. We investigated several application scenarios, including gaming and VR navigation. As haptic displays based on the gyroscopic effect tend to be dependent on user action, these application scenarios appeared to be the most fitting.
phone calls for one of two reasons. The first is for information exchange, and speech, as mobile phones in their current form enable it, is well-suited for that. The second reason, however, is the need for nearness – to be in touch with someone. In this sense, speech alone has clear limitations.
We developed three prototypes that investigate future visions of physically being in touch through a mobile phone. We proposed three new channels of communication – grasp, moisture and airflow – and explored their effects using phone-shaped prototypes to simulate what it would be like if a loved one could give you a squeeze – and even a kiss – through the phone.
with touch screens, yet feel so little. This project investigated a new way to create feedback for touch screen users: a stylus that provides frictional actuation. This stylus, or pen, has a ball on its tip which is connected to an electromagnetic coil. The coil serves as a kind of brake, enabling fine-tuned control of the force required to move the pen. This opens up the possibility of creating graphical user interface elements on the screen with varying surface properties and weights.
The frictionally-augmented touch pen could, for example, communicate the priority of news items by means of the force required to scroll to them. Items rated high by the community are easier to stop at. High-consequence operations (e.g. signing a contract) could be harder to perform with the pen than less consequential ones (e.g. signing a greeting card).
Our hands are skilful by themselves, but may need material resistance to operate at their full potential. Adding friction to elements within a piece of software (e.g. user guides within layout software) can help make manipulation of the digital space more realistic, leveraging the inherent skills of the human hand.
are very good at feeling the shape of the things they hold. This project investigated ways for a device with a dynamically adjustable shape to display digital content in a tactile way. For example, when reading an e-book, the amount of pages remaining can be indicated by increasing or decreasing the device’s thickness on the respective side. Or imagine a phone that shifts to »point« the way during mobile navigation. The user can follow the route by simply feeling the device, rather than looking down at the screen.
Check out my talk at TEDxBerlin to learn more about this project.
augments digital content with the physical sensation of a responsive, tactile display. Thanks to a moving weight inside the prototype, the device can reposition its mass, shifting its center of gravity in response to a variety of cues.
For example, dragging and dropping can be accompanied by the physical sensation of following the dragged object via synchronized movement of the device’s center of gravity. Weight shifting also adds a second dimension, or meta-layer, to information displays: Progress through a playlist, for example. An actuated center of weight may be particularly helpful during mobile navigation, conveying walking directions intuitively and non-visually, allowing users to navigate safely without needing to look at their screen.
Check out my talk at TEDxBerlin to learn more about this project.
explored the possibilities of giving mobile phones lifelike qualities: breathing and pulsating, for example. They notify users not only upon messages and phone calls but are continuously responsive with physical movements, responding to signals such as their user’s touch.
Check out my talk at TEDxBerlin to learn more about this project.
phone call is alike. What if there was a way to flag certain calls as important, and others as less so? Tactful Calling denotes a call’s level of urgency using a force-sensitive dial button. Placing an important call requires pushing the button with more force, while a more hesitant call needs only a gentle touch.
On the receiving end, the user can set up a filter for incoming calls, such as redirecting any not flagged as important. Tactful Calling enables phone users to accept, reject or ignore calls with greater awareness of context, improving communication and human-to-human connectedness.
sound surprising, but new perspectives can be gained through closed eyes. In my master’s thesis at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, I investigated the potential for eye closure to enrich the experience of visual media.
I developed various applications to test my hypothesis, such as the issuing of commands by closing one or both eyes (e.g. activating the sniper scope in a first-person shooter game, or causing a text processor to read the current sentence aloud). Next, I conducted experiments that allowed for an experiential investigation of the topic. This included a movie that intermediately asked the audience to close its eyes, maintaining mental imagery through sound alone even after the visual input was omitted.
should feel different than taking a picture, even if we press the same button on our phone to do both. With a force sensor and a force-exerting motor on the inside of a mobile phone, we could create phone buttons capable of so much more – almost as much as our fingers can do.
Enter the Dynamic Knob. This button can be used as a shape-based display, a pressure-sensitive input source or various combinations of the two. Consider taking a photo, a frequently performed operation on our phones. The two-step process of focusing, then pressing the shutter, could be haptically perceivable while operating the Dynamic Knob. Meanwhile, deleting a folder of pictures could be made harder to perform, as it’s a more critical and less frequently used operation. The device allows for “squeezing,” such as with a voice mail message. Users can navigate the message while holding the phone to their ear: squeezing normally to play, releasing to rewind and squeezing strongly to fast-forward.