Author: Peter Dalsgaard

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Interaction design Publications Research

Peepholes as means of engagement in interaction design

I’m currently at the Nordes conference in Oslo. It’s quite a hectic event for me this year since I have to give three presentations. One of these is about the paper Peepholes as means of engagement in interaction design (.pdf), co-authored with Christian Dindler.

By peepholes, we refer to aspects of interactive artifacts and environments that utilize the tension between what is hidden and what is revealed to foster engagement. As a foundation for discussing the qualities of peepholes, we outline a pragmatist perspective on engagement in the paper. This perspective emphasizes the reciprocal relation between people, technology, and environment. From this perspective, we then explore the concept of peepholes as an example of a concrete means of engagement on the basis of a number of interactive installations, including two of our own design cases.

Here are the slides from yesterdays presentation of the paper:

Categories
Publications Research

Video and slides from PhD defense

I defended my PhD dissertation, Designing Engaging Interactive Environments: A Pragmatist Perspective on June 25th 2009. Below I have embedded a video of my talk at the defense – you can skip the introduction and formalities and jump to 2:50 for the main presentation. The slides are not very clear on the video, so these are embedded as a slidecast below the video.
If you don’t feel like watching the proceedings, you can also download the manuscript for my presentation (.pdf) to read alongside the slides.
[fve]http://vimeo.com/6244929[/fve]

Categories
Architecture Interaction design Research

Presentation: Experience in Interaction Design

Experience in Interaction Design on Prezi

Two weeks ago, I gave a talk on Experience in Interaction Design at an information and media studies research seminar. The talk sketches out the various ways in which the concept of experience is approached in interaction design. In particular, i emphasize the pragmatist perspective on experience that i build upon in my own work. This is followed by a discussion on the challenges and potentials of working with experiential aspects in real-life design projects, e.g. Aarhus by Light, Climate on the Wall and Warsaw MoMA.

I have been trying out alternatives to Powerpoint as a presentation tool, and I stumbled upon the magnificent and elegant Prezi. The embedded presentation above should give you the gist of things: Prezi basically gives you an infinite canvas on which you structure your content. You can then draw out paths on the canvas when building presentations and zoom through these when giving a talk. Do try out the full-screen option!

Categories
Architecture Visualisation

555 KUBIK – How it would be, if a house was dreaming

555 Kubik is a facade projection that dissolves the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers “Galerie der Gegenwart”. The resulting permeability of the facade “uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves – describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself.”

555 Kubik is produced by www.urbanscreen.com and art directed Daniel Rossa.

Categories
Interaction design Research

PhD Afterparty

I’m happy to say that my PhD defense went very well, and that I am now officially entering my post-doctoral life. The defense was recorded, and I’m looking into a neat way of combining the video stream with my slides and manuscript. Also, I’m adding the finishing touches to the dissertation, which I will make available alongside the statement from the committee.

So, what’s next?

Although the final PhD writing sprint dragged me away from the various research projects that I was involved in, I have rapidly been finding myself re-involved. I’m in a research position that spans the rest of the year, so this fall I will be working on the Digital Urban Living project, as well as teaching two classes, Knowledge Sharing and Organizational Learning and Introduction to Interaction Design.

Categories
Interaction design

Dieter Rams: Less, But Better

Good designers must always be avant-gardists, always one step ahead of the times. They should – and must – question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes. For the reality in which they live, for their dreams, their desires, their worries, their needs, their living habits. They must also be able to assess realistically the opportunities and bounds of technology.

via Less, But Better – an interview with design legend Dieter Rams at  BBH Labs.

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Interaction design Publications Research

PhD Defense June 25th

My dissertation, Designing Engaging Interactive Environments: A Pragmatist Perspective, has been accepted by my PhD committee, and I will be defending it on June 25th. The event is open to the public, so feel free to swing by – here is the official invitation (.pdf). I’m psyched that it got accepted, and a bit anxious in the face of the defense itself.

I’ll be giving a 30 minute presentation of my PhD project – not a very long stretch of time to present three years of research – followed by 3×45 minutes of discussions with the members of the committee: Peter Wright, Research Professor at Sheffield Hallam University, Thomas Binder, Associate Professor at the Danish Design School, and Ole Iversen, chairman of the committee and Associate Professor at Aarhus University. Though I expect tough questions and a bit of academic slugging, I also look forward to discussing the potentials and problems of my research. If all goes well with the defense, I’ll write up a summary of the response from the committee and make it available along with the dissertation proper.

Categories
Interaction design Publications Research

Some late thoughts about CHI 2009

Roughly a month ago I attended the CHI 2009 conference in Boston straight after handing in my dissertation. Together with co-authors Lone Koefoed Hansen and Kim Halskov, I had two papers for presentation: Performing Perception – Staging Aesthetics of Interaction and Dynamically Transparent Windows. In addition to the plethora of activities and presentation tracks, this made for a rather hectic conference experience. Having had a few weeks to let things sink in, I consider the conference to be the most interesting I have yet attended in my (admittedly brief) academic carreer.

With 14 parallel sessions, there was always something fascinating going on, and much like music festivals, this meant that I had to make tough choices and miss talks and panels that I would have liked to attend. I must give credit to the organizers for exploring a variety of different presentation and discussion forms: Workshops, courses, colloquia, keynotes, short papers, long papers, case studies, panel discussions, design community talks, invited thematic presentations, presentation of selected journal publications, alt.chi presentations, and numerous extra-curricular activities, including an inspiring visit to the MIT Media Lab. As an interesting addition there were a number of “battle-sessions” in which the presentation of particularly contestable papers were followed by panel-discussions, e.g. concerning the role of ethnography in design, or the quantification of experiential aspects of interaction.

Out of the many good contributions (there was a total of 277 accepted papers), I’ve selected six that I found particularly fascinating with regards to my own research interests, and which I hope to discuss in more length in future posts:

Bardzell: Interaction Criticism and Aesthetics

Benford, Giannachi & Koleva
: From Interaction to Trajectories: Designing Coherent Journeys Through User Experiences

Gaver et al: Anatomy of a Failure: How We Knew When Our Design Went Wrong, and What We Learned From It

Snibbe & Raffle: 
Social Immersive Media: Pursuing Best Practices for Multi-user Interactive Camera/projector Exhibits

Herring et al: 
Getting Inspired! Understanding How and Why Examples are Used in Creative Design Practice

Lim, Stolterman & Tenenberg
: The Anatomy of Prototypes: Prototypes as Filters, Prototypes as Manifestations of Design Ideas

Categories
Research

First impressions of Wolfram’s Alpha

ReadWriteWeb takes a first look at Alpha, a new “computational knowledge engine” based on Stephen Wolfram‘s Mathematica, poised to go live within the next  weeks. Though touted as a potential Google killer, it is in fact a different sort of beast. Rather than constantly scouring the web, it is built around curated data from various sources, which is then subjected to Natural Language Processing algorithms based on Mathematica code. The search interface is seemingly similar to that of Google et al. whereas the results stand out, providing not only proposed answers but also an array of related information. The results will also present links to the sources used for the answer.

ReadWriteWeb’s article is based on a demo which featured number-crunching searches and replies, so one could hypothesize that Alpha will be mainly geared towards such queries. It will be interesting to see how well the notion of curated data and well-crafted results plays out in real life.

Update:
For more snippets of information, have a look at The Guardian’s preview of Alpha, or get an extensive overview and analysis at CNET.

Categories
Architecture Interaction design Visualisation

fLUX Binary Waves

fLUX, binary waves by Metalab is an installation based on measurements of infrastructural and communicational flows and their transposition into luminous, sonic and kinetic rules. This relation between the installation and the urban activity happens in real time and sets each person as an element of the installation, as a centre of the public realm.

From the project description:

The installation fLUX, binary waves is constituted by a network of 32 rotating and luminous panels of 3 meter-high and 60 centimetres wide, placed every 3 meters to form a kinetic wall. The panels rotate around their vertical axis, and have a black reflective surface on one side, the other being plain mat white. Their rotation is controlled by microprocessors, allowing to determine precisely the rotation speed and angle, while their networking allows to synchronise the movement of the 32 panels. The microprocessors are connected to infrared sensors, capturing the surrounding infrastructural flows, defining the frequency and amplitude of the rotation. According to this set up, each impulse is transmitted from one panel to the other, describing visual waves running from one side of the installation to the other, and then bouncing back while progressively loosing oscillation. All these principles relate the ‘micro-events’ happening in the area to a unified play of light, colours and sounds directly derived from the rhythm of the city flows.

As such, the installation proposes an urban sign having as subject the ‘urban’ and as message to be a catalyst of urbanity via the transcription of urban flows in a contemporary play of kinetics, lights and sound.