Outcomes: View Now
The first phase of your project is planning. This is a quick assignment designed to help you gather some inspirational resources and assets you’ll need to complete it. As part of this exercise you’re going to search for creative precedents and report back on what you find. Together, we’ll develop a large database of design approaches to inspire our work in this project.
The goal is to broaden your understanding of the field and deepen your knowledge of prior work that’s relevant to this project and to the course. You’ll be expected to select a couple of works and report on your findings with a critical perspective.
By the end of this exercise, students will:
have identified and rigorously review one precedent projects that relate to the course
helped co-create a set of exemplars to draw on as part of their own explorations;
have increased their ability to describe the domain of connected products.
Having developed a shared understanding of the role objects play in relationships, as well as ambient, embodied and tangible devices, you are to seek out and report on an IoT project that explores these ideas. It must be something you haven’t seen before, is relevant to the project at hand (i.e. matches the criteria), and could be used inform your design approach
Brief: Identify and report on an ambient/embodied/tangible strategy for bringing individuals or groups together through connected experiences (i.e. enhancing relationships with objects)
The emphasis here is on discovery. That means, choosing a project introduced in the course material, as a precedent in the project brief or that you already know defeats the purpose.
Explore design concepts, artistic works, news sites, blogs, aggregator, as well as conferences, journals and scientific papers to find exciting examples of the Internet of Things vision. This could equally be a historical example which informed the kinds of products and scenarios we encounter today, a breakthrough product which has had impact or influence, a current and state-of-the-art consumer device, a cutting edge research prototype, or a speculative proposal for a future device. There’s also no constraints on the sources or places you can look but some starting points are listed below.
A Note As part of your creative project you are expected to include a section in your documentation on Context. This section will ask you to provide a short write up of your outcome as it relates to:
This exercise will help you begin to prepare this section.
While your creative project is collaborative, this discovery exercise is completed independently. Each person must submit an example
No two students may submit the same example. Claim early and make sure you review each others work before posting.
Create a Post in the #discoveries channel on slack (see this guide on submitting your work for discovery exercises.
Important: Title your post with the name of the project and include the following label at the end for grading purposes “#socialthings” e.g. My example name #socialthings
In the post, embed a video and/or images of the project, and write a short critical reflection on the project (about 200 words) in which you:
Briefly describe the project (a couple of sentences) and who made it.
Describe why you selected the project (what is interesting, inspirational, innovative, etc. about it)
Describe why you believe it’s an important or innovative example of an IoT device
Critique the project - what are its shortcomings; how could it be made better, what did they get right and what didn’t they get right and why, etc.
Draw relationships to other work: What inspired or informed it? How does it compare to other work? Why is it influential and what has it influenced?
Note: Create a separate post for each example.
Note: Follow the instructions carefully as these projects require you to follow the posting instructions to receive full grades.
By no means an exhaustive list! You should explore beyond these!
Online Aggregators and new Sites
Conferences and Research
ACM International conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI)
INST-INT- “assembles an international roster of acclaimed creators to explore the intersection of art, technology and interaction.Expect a broad investigation into creating interactive experiences involving space, architecture, and bodies, all aided by high and low tech.”
Labs and Agencies
Northwestern’s TIDAL Lab
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID)’s Current Projects
CMU’s CodeLab
Steve Wilson’s (not maintained) site contains multitudes of tangible and reactive projects