Paja

Drawdio – a Pencil that draws sounds

The world’s deepest bin: The fun theory

Let it snow: Google Search during Christmas vacation

The Speed Camera Lottery: The fun theory

Ningen Gakki, Turn Your Body Into a Musical Instrument

Nicodama: Ryota Kuwakubo

Clocky: Nanda Home

Playble: Yumiko Tanaka

TV Wand

Many products and services requires interactions today and it has been a big challenge for designers in how to sketch ideas. Sketching on paper will not describe your idea any more as you need to illustrate experiences. This course teaches you various techniques of how you can sketch experiences by making functional prototypes. The prototype can be from wearable objects to installations. The course will provide easy-to-use and quick-to-make tools and materials. You will form groups and develop ideas based on a given theme. The groups iterate their designs through prototyping. The final prototype should be presented at Media Lab Demoday in May.

You can find student work in previous years as follows.

http://mlab.taik.fi/paja/?cat=45

If you have any question, please contact Michihito Mizutani.

This post describes how to create PCB with Roland Modela MDX-20 mill machine using Fritzing open souce software. The instruction using Eagle is described in another post.

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There are two ways to connect Android to Arduino over USB. They are Android Debug Bridge Mode (ADB) and Accessory Mode (ADK). ADK supports only newer Android than 2.3.4 while ADB supports even older than 2.2. A demo in this page uses ADB.

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Two cups at the top: The Cat Plum: Geraldine de Beco, Bernardaud

White cup at the bottom: Creaturecups

Making an everyday object playful.

This is our main theme for Designing Interactions with Electronic course at Media Lab Helsinki this year. The playfulness can happen in the interaction with objects. To make an everyday object playful, you need to observe and understand its usage in sequences and then think how to modify it to let people experience such a fun. During the introduction, several examples was showed to the students.

The most important thing to learn from this course is to “communicate design through prototypes”. The playfulness is such a subjective topic which you need to illustrate expected experience in some format. One of the most valuable ways to do that is to prototype the experience.

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QML is a good user interface prototyping tool to develop mobile phone applications on Nokia devices. It is a JavaScript-based declarative language, which you can easily create UI and run it on the mobile phones. This post collects QML training materials especially for UI designers who doesn’t know programming but need to demonstrate UI as working software. To set up QML developing environment on your PC, please look at another postdescribing a step-by-step installation.

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This post describes how to develop your first QML application on Nokia N9. Unfortunately I have only instructions for Mac users but I assume the steps for other platforms are similar to this.

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I am experimenting N9 and Arduino. Since QML on N9 doesn’t support any serial communication over USB, I am using the serial communication over Bluetooth.

This post describes how you control a servo motor with N9 over Bluetooth.

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The purpose of Interaction Design with Electronic workshop is an “intensive hands on” workshop to learn how to turn your idea into a real physical object using electronics and microcontrollers.
 These tools and techniques will be useful for rapid prototyping in physical interaction design and/ or installation work.

The course provides a journey of design process from developing concepts to prototyping interactions. During the course, students learn how to build prototypes using software programming and electronic assembling. After a theme is given, students will work on developing concepts within groups and planning for prototypes. Actual prototyping experience consists of two phases. The students will be asked to present their work in progress after the first phase. Feedback from guests and other audiences should be applied to the second. The final prototypes will be presented in Demoday in the Media Lab.

These video are from some of students’ final presentations at the previous workshops.

Multitouch Table – aniMate.

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This post describes the way to establish communications between open frameworks on Mac OX10.6 and Arduino. The code using it is created on Xcode developing software.  It uses ofArduino library which let you control Arduino directly from Xcode. Although the open frameworks also provide a generic Serial protocol. In this case, you need to create own Arduino code using Arduino IDE software.

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Designing interactions course

Date: January 24, 2010

Location: Media lab Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland

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Intensive workshop in Designing interactions course

Date: February 7 – 11, 2011

Location: Media lab Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland

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This post describes how to create PCB with Roland Modela MDX-20 mill machine. The above video shows a mill machine creating a PCB.

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Here is some examples that students worked on during the intensive workshop. Nuno Correia also created some example demos during his lecture in the workshop.

Intensive workshop for Designing interactions course

Date: Steptember 6 – September 10, 2010

Location: Media lab Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland

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