Tinkerkit

I came across a link to Tinkerkit Modules on the Umeå Institute of Design Blog and it may have just opened my eyes to how I can realise my research project.

They are relatively easy to use kits of Arduino modules which include many of the sensors that would be needed in an interactive physics environment. They even market them as devices to be used in school environments, so I'd like to look into this further as a viable hardware option for my project.

Cubelets

The video below interested me due to the modular and sensory nature of the cubes, which when connected together behave in different ways. It made me think of my desire to do a research project based on kinetic interaction which could help someone learn about maths or physics.

They seem to be a brilliant size and appear to be easy to use. Not so sure about the background music to the video though!

Cubelets Engineering Prototypes from eric schweikardt on Vimeo.

Helping digital learning become physically interactive

When combining my interests for education and architecture, I started to think about how digital technologies were impacting on the teaching of subjects within our schools, and in particular, within maths.

Currently digital technologies and teaching maths fuse together mainly through web based, or at least screen based, maths tasks which are reliant upon the students maintaining interest in looking at a computer screen for long periods of time. This can become boring, especially for younger children who become fidgety!

On the other hand, however, classrooms are full of physical maths aids, such as abacus', movable clocks, counting blocks, etc.

What I'd like to look into is combining these two elements into a spatial, tangible learning experience, which uses digital technologies embedded in physical objects or environments to generate ideas and help the learning process. This could easily be translated into other subjects, such as English, science, geography, history, foreign languages, etc.

I'm sure there are precedents of this that have been looked into already and over the next few days, I'd like to look into any existing research that has been carried out.

So far I have found one learning proposal, suggested by Larissa Alexander at Stanford University, which talks about creating a series of blocks, which when linked together add up on a counter below and feed back the total number.

I like this idea, however I'd like to go further by looking into how children learn, and instead of returning a number straight away, creating a system which challenges the child into thinking about the answer of the task, before the real answer is declared.

I'd also like to make the spatial experience into one which is even more tangible and physical, perhaps even linking it into P.E. classes or full internal/external space designs.

Another quick blog post I stumbled across is one by UpsideLearning, which explains how digital technologies embodied in physical objects can aid learning and which digital technologies could be employed to do this.

Stylus Interaction

I've had a very hectic week this week, but this post on engadget caught my eye, so I thought I'd upload it, even if I don't find time to upload anything else.

Microsoft researchers show off intuitive stylus, don't know how to hold a pencil

I'm not sure that this is the way I would think about stylus', it seems a bit unnecessary almost, and not very intuitive. Even a replaceable nib that the pen would recognise would perform the same function, and with a great deal less technology involved! But it seemed interesting research none the less. :-)

2D23D

I first came across this post on Zach Kron's Buildz blog well over a year ago, and short of anything to write about this week I find myself retuning to it. The post briefly demos some of the cool things that can be achieved by an API addition to Revit, mapping image data into 3D forms. Its nothing new, mesh modelling packages have been doing something similar for years, but I have been meaning to have a play with loading hand drawn sketches into the plug-in, and mapping them onto a basic grid.

Basically, I am interested to see if I could I generate a rough 3D model based purely on my doodles? Jennie wrote an article last week discussing how scanning your scribbles archives them, but doesn't really wrap them into a coherent workflow. With my tendency to use felt pens at the programmatic stage, I would love to see if I could get even simple massing models to jump into life on screen. This seems very straightforward, and coupled to into a graphics tablet I could see myself going through a lot of options very quickly, just doodling my thought process, in a fashion that is quite difficult to do in Revit normally, rearranging 3D components.

But could a little development work take the concept further? In the same way AutoCAD assigns different properties to different coloured lines, could a plug in read different colour pens differently? Could I even begin to mesh together sketches of plan and section into conceptual form?

Motivations for Interaction Design Research

In the last linked research session I mentioned three motivations for research. While this list isn’t exhaustive I think that it captures some of the core categories which may help you to navigate the often very complex world of interaction design research.

Technology Led

In some ways this category is a misnomer since all interaction design research tends to be motivated to some extend through technology. We make an assumption in this project that you will design something which uses digital networked technologies and this assumption is also a motivation. However, I use technology led here to refer to research which takes emerging technologies and asks “What cool stuff can we do with it?”. Recent examples of interaction design research in this area have been motivated by commercial products like the Wii and most recently the Xbox Kinect. Both Kinect and Wii (and specifically the WiiMote) made previously very expensive technology easily accessible. The Kinect’s ability to use optical 3D to build sophisticated representations of space and to recognize and track movement uses technology which before the release of the £100 device would have cost a lab 10s of the thousands of pounds. These devices offer many new interaction potentials and this sort of research tends to be playful but sometimes lacks the “so what factor”.

Problem Led

This is territory in which designers feel more comfortable. Problem driven research consists of finding a problem and then attempting to find a way of intervening in the problem to find a solution. The essence of this type of research tends to depend on the type of problem. The shift from Human Computer Interaction research to Interaction Design research is a recognition that in computer science that many of the User centered problems created by the design of computer systems are “Wicked Problems”. Engineering design problems tend to be well contained where the variables of the potential solution can be measured and an optimum found. Early HCI research (and some modern HCI research as well) tended to measure the efficiency of user actions when interacting with a system – e.g. how many clicks does it take to access this software tool or how much time does it take to perform this operation? Wicked problems, however, are diffuse – there are no optimum solutions but many possible approaches. Interaction designers increasingly tackle and seek out wicked problems of the sort we discussed in the last session. How can we support the communication of emotion in the classroom? How do we increase voter turnout in local elections?

Concept Led

Concept led research is more difficult to describe but emerges from a tradition closer to fine art practice than design. Concept or ideas driven work is exemplified by many of the projects that emerge from the RCA and the Interaction Design group at Goldsmiths. These projects are often speculations or provocations. They often question the role of technology or assumptions made by technology designers.

Introduction to Interaction Design Video

I'm posting this video for the Linked Reserach students as an introduction to the principles of interaction design. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3rxCLhzmXY&feature=youtube_gdata_player