The deadline for applications for the CIID Interaction Design Programme is May 3rd! I can only recommend doing this, if you're interested in interaction design. Here's the official announcement:

Dear All - In parallel with the launch of our new website, we are very pleased to announce the opening of the application process for our next generation of students. As an education concerned with the broad potential of design and technology, the CIID Interaction Design Programme is looking for a wide diversity of students. We plan to have a class of 25 people and welcome applicants from all over the world with educational backgrounds in varying disciplines. You should be curious and creative, enthusiastic about design and have the desire to study in a cross-disciplinary environment. Whether you’re currently studying or working, you should be interested in the connections between education and interaction design practice. To find out more about the application process and requirements please refer to the website: http://ciid.dk/education/admissions/ - there is a list of FAQs but if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask. The curriculum teaches students to apply technology to everyday life through the design of software, products and services. We believe in a hands-on and user-centered approach to interaction design. Students learn the programming and electronics skills needed to work with technology as a design medium. They conduct user-research and experience prototyping to provide real-world grounding to their concepts. Frequent work in multi-disciplinary teams encourages peer-to-peer learning and a diverse selection of visiting faculty exposes students to a range of expertise. You can view documentation of the course and student projects here: http://ciid.dk/education/portfolio/. Please feel free to distribute and post this information widely. Kind regards, Alie. Alie Rose PR & Communications Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design mobile: +45 2090 5005 email: a.rose@ciid.dk CIID web: www.ciid.dk Interaction Design Programme web: www.ciid.dkds.dk

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!

Simona (the head of our programme at CIID/DKDS) gave everybody a small cactus, that she thought suited our personality. She gave me this one:

It kind of looks like a brain - but a very small one. Not really sure what that means :)

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 more photos from our industry visits in my Flickr gallery.

I've wanted to write this post for about 6 months now. And now I'm finally doing it! Hooray! One of the first quick foundations courses we had was with Massimo Banzi and Gwendolyn Floyd, where we explored and played with physical computing. First week we played with the basics of Arduino and serial communication. That's where I built a couple of small (and stupid, but cute) robots with Jason. Second week I worked with Eilidh and Ashwin on a self-chosen concept within the realm of physical computing and networked objects. We decided that we wanted to design for "Guerilla free-time", in other words the project was a comment on how technology that is supposed to give us more free-time, actually ends up stealing our time, because everything becomes more and more efficient.

We set our context in busy office environments where people often isolate themselves in their cubicles, staring at the screen all day. The only times they take breaks is when they walk to and from the coffee machine or when they have lunch. We knew that we probably couldn't convince people to take extra breaks, so we decided to tap into the existing "break-facilitator" of the workplace: the coffee machine. Getting a cup of coffee usually takes less than a minute, and then you're back at your desk. We wanted to extend that time to a little more than a minute.

We decided to make a coffee machine that requires you to take a break, to get your coffee. We did it by hacking a coffee machine and a rocking chair, so that when you sat down in the rocking chair and started rocking, the coffee machine would start brewing you a nice cup of coffee. In addition to that, you would get a relaxing Gilbert O'Sullivan tune playing - and working as an indicator for when your coffee is ready. If you stop rocking or leave the chair, the chair will warn you by fading out the music. If you still aren't rocking, the coffee machine turns off.

We did that by making a special plugboard, that could be controlled wirelessly (Arduino and Xbee) that the coffee machine was plugged into. Under the chair we put another Xbee equipped Arduino with an accelerometer, hooked it up with a hacked El-Cheapo mp3-player and a small Nokia speaker.

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.

Ouch. This stuff actually happened before Christmas... I'm not that good at updating regularly. I'll be back soon with a post about the TUI course we just finished, and hopefully that will make this site a bit more up-to-date. Well, the last week before Christmas was dedicated to "Skills Upgrade"-courses. The class was split in two, one half was working with James Tichenor and Joshua Walton from Rockwell Group, on different proposals for interactive installations for SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. The other half (which I was part of) worked with games and computer vision which was taught by Yaniv Steiner.

We spent the week experimenting with different small things within the field of computer vision. The first project we did, was the game "Style Wars" - a reaction game, where you use your hand as the game controller. The game is very simple: you and your opponent face each other like in a classic western duel. When you hear a specific bang-sound, it's all about being fastest to draw your gun (gun = pointing hand). If you react too early (before the right sound), you lose. The name "Style Wars" doesn't really make much sense - but the reason for the name is, that in the game, one player has the role of a flamenco-dude, the other player is a hip-hopper. I am assuming that it's common knowledge that flamenco-dancers and hip-hoppers don't get along very well.

Dave Mellis captured me and Erlend dueling in the video above. After making "Style Wars" which was based on simple Flash-motion tracking, we moved on to reacTIVision, where we made our own lo-fi reactable with a standard camcorder, a window and a desklamp. We used the table for testing and having fun with both Flash and Processing.org. One of the applications were a "body-mixer", that made it possible to build your own custom CIID student (or freak) by mixing the legs, torsos and heads from all of us. The controls were three "dials" with fiducials underneath.

I uploaded some pics from the skills upgrade on Flickr - you should check them out if you want to see some of the other cool stuff people made, like the Dancing Game, for instance... The thumbnails are here:

The second part of our GUI class was about interactive data visualisation. Again, we had an outstanding external teacher: Shawn Allen from Stamen Design in San Francisco. Along with Shawn we also had our own CIID genious David Mellis to help us with the ActionScript3 programming. We started using FlexBuilder, but quickly realised that it would be easier for the beginners to start using Flash as the environment instead. I already knew a bit of AS3 and Flash, so for me the two weeks were about upgrading my skills in this field, staying in the context of data visualisation. We started using XML data from UN Data, which is an enormous source of information on almost anything. I started digging into data about alcohol consumption per capita for a wide range of countries, and came up with a small application that will let you filter, sort and highlight countries based on either country name or consumption. The app is just a quick one, so it's probably buggy and hard to use, but at least I got around handling XML data in Flash. Click the screenshot below, to try the application. [caption id="attachment_258" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Screenshot of the data visualisation of alcohol consumption per capita"] [/caption]  The second week, I started exploring other data formats than XML. I went with a set of datafiles in CSV-format from the Danish Statistics Bank. Here the main task was to parse and combine different files into one dataset, so that I could use it for a visualisation. The data i worked with, was about the number of fatal bike accidents in Denmark for the last ten years. Actually I was surprised to see how relatively low the numbers were, compared to the amount of cyclists here in the country. Again, usability was not my main focus, and I know there could be done a lot in this field, so please bear with me. Here my main focus lied in using layout organizers, which is why you will find three buttons, each representing a different layout. [caption id="attachment_261" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Screenshot from the data visualisation of bike accidents. Beware of the bugs!"] [/caption] Click the part of Denmark you want to see the statistics for, and you will get a graphical representation of the fatal accidents. Red bikes are women, black are men. Mouse over a bike to see limited details on the accident. Btw: For some reason the swf runs fine in the external Flash player, but acts a bit strange in the embedded browser player. Do you know why?