Design for Social Encounters: Using connected objects to support meaningful experiences of social sensing

Almost every mundane activity in which we engage during the day (e.g., walking, running, meeting other people etc.) leaves a trace in the form of data that can be collected, measured and shared as input to shape individual and social interactions. This data can be referred to as ‘activity traces’ (Dong 2014). A nascent application domain for...

Materials for Action: A Performative Material Toolkit for Social Interaction Design

Social networking sites are today playing an essential role in our daily lives. These web-based services not only focus on providing people a platform to share interests and activities, but also facilitate the process of keeping in touch with families and friends. Take Facebook, the most popular social networking website, as an example: people...

FUTURE.ME: Exploring design opportunities to enrich social intimacy through everyday practices

This project focuses on 2 issues: 1. Explore the meaning to make social media tangible and 2. Sustain and enrich social intimacy on social media services. The 1st issue was the initial project goal, while later on we choose to address it through creating a design to fulfil the 2nd issue, since through a preliminary investigation we did see the...

Postboard: Free-form tangible messaging for people with aphasia (and other people)

In this paper we report the design of a communication system for people with aphasia. It consists of pairs of physical whiteboards that are connected over the internet. This allows users to combine any personal language skills with visuals and already existing materials at hand. The design has been based on feedback and evaluation sessions with...

Designing physical social media

This graduation project explored the design and application of interactive tangible products as extension of existing social media. Products called awareness systems are developed to help people create a peripheral awareness of each others’ activities, context or status. Awareness systems aim to bridge the gap between face-to-face communication...

Content for the TikTegel: Exploiting the potential of tangible interactive educational materials

The TikTegel, by Serious Toys, is a game computer that looks like a tablet, without keyboard, mouse or traditional screen. Players interact with the board by placing objects on it and receive auditive and visual feedback by sound and parts of the board that light up. The objective of the project is to use the tangible interactive possibilities...

A tangible design tool for sketching materials in products

Industrial designers make sketches and physical models to start and develop ideas and concept designs. Such representations have advantages that they support fast, intuitive, rich, sensory exploration of solutions. Although existing tools and techniques provide adequate support where the shape of the product is concerned, the exploration of...

Explorascope: Stimulation of language and communicative skills of multiple-handicapped children through an interactive, adaptive educational toy

Very young non- or hardly speaking children with severe disabilities need active guidance to stimulate interaction with their environment in order to develop their communicative and linguistic skills. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems can help this process, provided that they are tuned to this specific user group....