University of Washington IxD 483 students Neil Rhoades (IxD), Adam Rule (HCDE), Katie Suskin (IxD), and Hanne Trafnik (ID) received the Best Presentation Award for their project APT at the Microsoft Design Expo 2012 last week in Redmond. The Microsoft Design Expo is an annual showcase of cutting edge Interaction Design work from invited international top tier Interaction Design programs.

APT was this year’s selected project from the University of Washington Interaction Design program responding to the design challenge ‘Information is in my World’.

APT is a new mobile application paradigm that facilitates the contextual and proximity-based distribution of mobile content. APT was developed during Winter Quarter 2012 in the IxD senior studio ‘Advanced Projects in Interaction Design’ (ART483). Instructor: Prof. Axel Roesler / Microsoft Liason: Nathan Auer.

Watch a HD version of the APT presentation here.

The seven design programs that participated in the MS Design Expo 2012 were the Royal College of Art (London, UK), Umea Universitet Institute of Design (Umea, Sweden) Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design (Pittsburgh, PA), Delft University of Technology, School of Design (Delft, the Netherlands), Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (Rio De Janeiro, Brazil), Tsinghua University (Beijing, China), and University of Washington, School of Art, Division of Design (Seattle, WA). Students from each school presented their projects as part of the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit on July 18, 2012.

Origin was presented at this year’s Microsoft Design Expo in Redmond, July 18-19 as the UW IxD project responding to the design challenge ‘Get Connected, Stay Connected’

Origin is a file management system that tags your data the way your brain does.

In recognition of the shortcomings of current file management systems, Origin seeks to improve the way in which data is tagged, making its operation far more organic (or brain-like) than any typical system. By tagging data with contextual markers, it delivers users what they want, when they want it, without degrading opportunities to search for other data. Origin connects you with your files—it is a file management system that tags your data using contextual markers. Watch a video of the Origin presentation here.

Origin was developed in ART385 – Design and Society during Winter Quarter 2011 by

Vu Chu

Jason Wong

This year’s design expo class was offered at the junior level in a studio class of 23 students. In five teams the class developed very different projects that address the theme of the expo – Get Connected, Stay Connected. The design process encompassed all stages of design development from the identification of common practices, salient needs, uncharted terrain and interesting design opportunities, followed by field observation, data analysis, ideation, conceptual design in many variations, and user experience prototyping. Rather than giving the class a specific design topic in the context of the design expo theme, It was important to us that the student teams each identified a design space where their experience in the team would make an interesting contribution. We started with a white sheet of paper and ended with video prototypes of each envisioned experience design that showcases interesting user experience scenarios that not only include the product or interface that would anchor the design, but also portrayed the context into which the design would be fielded and how it potentially could shape novel activities and engagements.

By Nancy Wick: Rethinking work environments through interaction design. Art meets engineering when Axel Roesler’s students help redesign and airplane’s flight deck.

Interaction Design graduate student Kris Martin finishes his M.F.A Thesis on real time documentation for the development of an mobile device-based medical emergency black box information system (MEBBIS) with Prof. Axel Roesler and Dr. Brian Ross, Bala Nair, and Alan Au at the UW School of Medicine’s Institute for Simulation and Interprofessional Studies (ISIS). MEBBIS supports the real time documentation of Code Blue events.

In hospitals, Code Blue is generally used to indicate that a patient requires immediate resuscitation, most often as the result of a cardiac arrest. Within the medical field, such an event is known as a “code”. For the doctors and nurses working to save lives, distractions from the task at hand resulting in delays or mistakes literally may make the difference between life and death. Medical professionals are required to address the emergency, and revive the critically ill patient but also, as importantly, to produce documentation that is critical to the hand off the patient to other healthcare teams along the chain of care. As can be expected, in the rush to provide lifesaving interventions, real-time clinical documentation can take a back seat.

The existing protocol for documentation of code blue events requires the second nurse to arrive to record every significant event in written form. Observation of code blue drills at the hospital revealed that the demands of the situation do not permit everything to be captured in real time. In most cases, the documenter is only able to take brief notes which serve as an outline. Studies of similar real time documentation tasks show that in order to bridge missing information as result of the time pressure generated by cascading events during recording, additional information is added retrospectively after the conclusion of the event. As a result, documentation errors and omissions can occur.

In the course of this ongoing 2-year research project we are exploring how a work-centered interaction design approach can improve the documentation of medical emergencies – How can we faciliatate the real time recording of dynamic events, implemented into an interactive system to effectively support the care of the patient by enhancing the caregivers’ access to relevant information, and simultaneously generate a record of the sequence of conditions, treatments, and decisions made along the way.

ART483/484 – Projects in Interaction Design, Winter Quarter 2010
Prof. Axel Roesler / Division of Design / UW School of Art, Division of Design
Yong Rhee & Sander Viegers / Microsoft Office

Microsoft provided a forum around the theme “Service meets Social” to showcase exceptional design process and ideas. As part of a quarter long course, students from five invited international Interaction Design programs (Carnegie Mellon, Art Center College, NYU Tisch School, Universidad Iberoamericano Mexico City, Central St. Martins College of the Arts, and University of Washington / IxD) were asked to form interdisciplinary teams of 4-6 students to design a user experience prototype, encouraging out-of-the-box-thinking, and engaging with students from other design teams from around the world in exploring implications of digital and physical worlds as these intersect where service meets social.

Interaction Design ART483 students Andrew Battenburg, Minnie Bredow, Tim Damon, Sophie Milliotte, Jon Sandler, and Tanya Test presented their project ‘OpenDoor’ at the Microsoft Faculty Summit in Redmond yesterday.

Watch part 1 of the OpenDoor presentation
Watch the OpenDoor video prototype
Watch part 2 of the OpenDoor presentation

OpenDoor design process documentation (PDF)

OpenDoor is a mobile application that enables neighbors to share their resources. Our goal for individuals is to provide each member of the community with free goods and services. At the collective level, our aim is to develop sustainable local communities.

Rather than a large database of goods and services, the design relies on common interests: people who share a common interest will be more likely to need the same goods and services. As a community-driven service, OpenDoor focuses on the social by emphasizing direct relationships and face-to-face communication between neighbors.

Trust is established by constraints in location: A new member can only register in one neighborhood – this home base defines the proximity in which prospective exchanges can be posted and searched. OpenDoor participants build their profile by defining their interests and needs. When an OpenDoor participant looks for a good or service, the system will show the profiles of the neighbors that are most likely to have what they are looking for. OpenDoor participants send a direct request to these neighbors through the system. If the neighbors agree to meet, OpenDoor will automatically put them in contact over the phone.

OpenDoor participants can specify if their search is a regular inquiry or an immediate need, depending on the situation in which they are in. When there is an exchange between OpenDoor neighbors, their real world meeting is exemplified as a physical interaction that is the bump between their phones so that the exchange is documented like a receipt: both the lender and the borrower can track what needs to be returned when and to whom. In summary/big picture review, the system provides statistics on how much the user and their community saved thanks to OpenDoor.

UW Interaction Design graduate students Shweta Grampurohit and Nate Landes have received research associateships at Intel Labs Seattle. During Winter Quarter 2010 Nate worked with Intel’s Dr. Beverly Harrison and UW Computer Science Ph.D student Ryder Ziola on the interaction design for OASIS – Object Aware Situated Interaction System. OASIS examines a vision of using low-cost combinations of cameras and micro-projectors to create interactive “islands” or hotspots for gestural surface interaction, situated in locales of interest. Examples within the home include kitchen countertops, coffee tables, or bedside night stands.

OASIS focuses on interaction design challenges that naturally result from sensor-based perception and object awareness. The system treats physical objects as tangible encapsulations of context. From the perspective of an interaction grammar, objects are thus nouns to which we can bind virtual actions (i.e., verbs). In this hybrid physical- virtual system, actions are always virtual and are not physically instantiated. The home is especially well-suited to this style of application because it is an object-rich and activity-rich environment where activities and context can often be inferred from visually observable data. The OASIS system blends physical objects with virtual actions to create new everyday in-home applications. OASIS is illustrated using kitchen-based examples, but the system and interaction methods are designed for a broader range of hybrid physical-virtual applications. Interactive elements of the system include linking a single physical object to multiple possible actions, smoothly mixing virtual and physical objects, creating new objects, deleting objects, saving instances for later use, and grouping physical and virtual objects into collections.

OASIS has been featured in WIRED, MIT Technology Review, and PC Magazine. Watch a video demo of OASIS here

IxD projects and design process

IxD Gallery
UW IxD photo stream

The University of Washington offers a 2-year Master of Design (M.Des) degree in Interaction Design. More information about the degree can be found here

The University of Washington offers a 4-year Bachelor of Design (B.Des) degree in Interaction Design. More information about the degree can be found here

ART383 – Fundamentals of Interaction Design, Autumn Quarter 2009

Prof. Axel Roesler
In collaboration with Intel Labs Seattle

During an intensive five week project, five student teams conducted an iterative user-centered design process to explore future applications for the projection of interfaces on any surface suitable for display and interaction in the home of the future.

Design techniques ranged from contextual inquiry, ideation, and storyboarding, to concept visualizations and video protypes. Each design team was comprised of students from the Division of Design’s Interaction Design program and the HCI concentration in Human Centered Design and Engineering, the iSchool, Computer Science and Engineering, and students from other UW HCI-oriented majors.

The resulting five projects envision the embedding of community networks into the home, a search, interaction across walls, lifestyle coaching, and interactive cooking.

Watch videos of each of the five team presentations via the links provided at the end of each project description below:

Real Ideal is a life consultant that utilizes wall and floor space in the house to display ambient cues relating to a person’s current task or goal. We utilized Intel’s Bonfire technology to create a system that provided “reflections through projections”, highlighting and annotating parts of the house and everyday life that could be improved or changed. This lead to the creation a life consultant that was helpful and constructive without being intrusive or obnoxious. By taking areas where action is typically invisible and visualizing it, mundane or incomprehensible tasks such as water consumption become engaging and interactive. This idea of visualization can be applied in all of the areas of life from health, to finances, to calendars and scheduling, helping to streamline life’s obligations, increase productivity and achieve goals.

Watch a video of the Real Ideal presentation
Real Ideal PDF documentation

Drew Bregel (Human Computer Interaction & Design)
Lauren Cascio (Design Studies)
Rachel Choung (Biology)
Patrick Douglas (Informatics)
Shweta Grampurohit (Interaction Design)
Kaisha Hom (Visual Communication Design)
Jeremy Juel (Visual Communication Design)
Nate Landess (Interaction Design)

Mprint is based around the idea of an objects physical history. It makes use of these histories by visualizung a solution to an all too common problem: Losing things!

Mprint captures and leaves a residue underneath every object on designated surfaces. These residues are an indication that any particular object has occupied that space. Object residues become the entry point into Mprint’s interface which can locate a lost object and take snapshots of surfaces so that meaningful layouts and spatial relationships can be saved and recalled later.

Watch a video of the Mprint presentation
Mprint PDF presentation

Daniel Frum (Geography)
Hannah Getachew (Human Centered Design and Engineering)
Imri Larsen (Industrial Design)
Ben Mabry (Industrial Design)
Kristofer Martin (Interaction Design)
Daniya Ulgen (Design Studies)