Tobias Toft

It’s always nice to see other people mention your work, especially when it’s FastCompany!

Check out this well written article by Kit Eaton at FastCompany.

Only five more days to go before the final exams start. Here’s a little taste of what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months. More info will be available very soon!

My thesis at CIID is about objects with personality and the different ways there are to implement “artificial” personality in otherwise stupid objects. As part of my research I have decided to take a closer look at Valentino Braitenberg’s work with synthetic psychology in the beginning of the 80’s. Especially his investigations in the book “Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology” where he designed the rather famous Braitenberg vehicles.

The vehicles are extremely simple electronic objects, that seem to show a specific personality from their actions. The interesting thing is, that they are in fact extremely stupid, but because we (humans) only look at their actions without knowing why they act as they do, we tend to project our own logic and reason to them and thereby give them a personality that they actually don’t have. It sounds a bit complicated, but actually it isn’t – it’s just because I can’t explain it properly yet

I decided to base them on Arduino, though it might be overkill – the reason I did it is to keep flexibility, so that I later can upload more advanced firmware to the bots. Here’s a photo I took of one of my boards – unfortunately I put it upside down!

Anyway, of course I also snapped some photos of the first vehicle and it’s half-finished sibling today. Here they are:

You can see more photos in my Flickr photoset.

Last week we (the CIID/DKDS Pilot Year) visited a bunch of different companies. One of them was Bang & Olufsen, makers of extraordinary hi-fi equipment. Sorry for being such a geek, but I really love the old Bang & Olufsen designs. These five are my favourites (actually the MX tv should be here as well, but I didn’t get any shots of it):

And as a small bonus, a close-up of the Beosound 5 controls and the Beo 5 remote – extremely well-engineered aluminum parts. Maybe a bit over-engineered actually?

Here’s the Beo 5 remote. I still don’t know what I think about the design though.

And finally: B&O’s office and factory buildings are in general a bit boring, but the newest one was actually quite interesting. Here’s a couple of shots from the inside.

You can see a lot more photos from our industry visits in my Flickr gallery.

I’ve always been a fan of Don Norman and I can watch this talk over and over again.

I changed the design a bit on this blog, it’s not in any way radical but I just felt like changing it. I’m using the header to show some more or less random pictures I’ve taken. Most of them will probably be related to the Pilot Year or interaction design in some way.

The official CIID/DKDS Pilot Year project galleries are finally up! This is the place where all projects made throughout the year will be collected.