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....

Move to get moved: A search for methods, tools and knowledge to design for expressive and rich movement-based interaction

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

HomeTree - Gamified tool to increase creative session engagement for participants with diverse backgrounds

A creative session is a lot more than a session of generating ideas. It’s part of a much larger goal of delivering innovation in a company. It is necessary to get everyone on board and motivated. And when the motivation levels reached, then beautiful things can happen. In order to achieve a certain motivation level, It’s imperative that people...

Thermotion: an exploration of facilitating emotion perception with wearable thermal displays

The project aims at exploring tangible ways to communicate emotion. To narrow down the scope, I lay the focus on emotion communication in remote settings, a context when nonverbal communication is usually limited. From interviews, the neutral expression is found to be the main factor hindering a sufficient understanding of others' emotional...

Design of Human Computer Interface for blind children to learn programming languages

As the modern world progressing towards digital technologies, there is an increasing need for school students to learn programming skills so that they fit into the labor market now and in the future. Tangible programming toys and block-based languages are popular among younger children to learn to code. Students in middle and high school in...

Designing Safe 2.5D Tangible Shape Displays

2.5D shape display is a recent idea in the market that emerged as a platform of interaction between a computer and human. 2.5D shape display is essentially a grid-like matrix consisting of actuators and pins moving up and down in vertical motion to create pseudo-3D images. Focused as a visual display in some applications and as a medium of input...

Fluidic Control: Tangible control mechanisms for multi-material fluidic driven interfaces with material jetting additive manufacturing

Fluidic interfaces use liquids to sense, compute, and output a dynamic appearance or behavior in response to mechanical deformation inputs.<br/>Integrating logic and user-actuated control mechanisms in the interfaces can, in the future, enable to achieve more complex dynamic behaviors for designing interactive artifacts that are entirely analog...