Schlagwort: innovation

Book launch: Grounded Innovation by Lars Eric Holmquist

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At the Museum of the Weird in Austin Lars Erik Holmquist hosted a book launch party for his book: Grounded Innovation: Strategies for Creating Digital Products. The book uses a good number of research examples to highlight the challenges and approaches for digital products. The book has to parts: Methods and Materials and shows how both play together in the design of digital products. There is a preview for the book at Amazon.

Over 10 years back I worked together with Lars Erik on the European Project Smart-Its (http://www.smart-its.org/), where we created sensor augmented artifacts. The book features also some of this work. To get an overview of the project have a look at [1] and [2]. The concept of Smart-Its Friends is presented in [3]. Smart-Its friends proposed the idea, that products can be linked by sharing the same context (e.g. connecting a phones and a wallet by shaking them together).

[1] Lars Erik Holmquist, Hans-Werner Gellersen, Gerd Kortuem, Albrecht Schmidt, Martin Strohbach, Stavros Antifakos, Florian Michahelles, Bernt Schiele, Michael Beigl, and Ramia Maze;. 2004. Building Intelligent Environments with Smart-Its. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 24, 1 (January 2004), 56-64. (PDF) DOI=10.1109/MCG.2004.1255810 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2004.1255810

[2] Hans Gellersen, Gerd Kortuem, Albrecht Schmidt, and Michael Beigl. 2004. Physical Prototyping with Smart-Its. IEEE Pervasive Computing 3, 3 (July 2004), 74-82. (PDF) DOI=10.1109/MPRV.2004.1321032 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2004.1321032

[3] Lars Erik Holmquist, Friedemann Mattern, Bernt Schiele, Petteri Alahuhta, Michael Beigl, and Hans-Werner Gellersen. 2001. Smart-Its Friends: A Technique for Users to Easily Establish Connections between Smart Artefacts. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’01), Gregory D. Abowd, Barry Brumitt, and Steven A. Shafer (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, London, UK, UK, 116-122. (PDF)

Creativity Workshop at NRC Tampere

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Creativity is a key issue of creating novel applications and interaction methods and techniques. Over two days we ran a hands on prototyping workshop on physical user interaction. We setup teams of 3 people, each team including at least one person with design and one with programming skills. Within about 5 hours the teams had to create a multiplayer interactive game – using a mouse or several mice as basic sensors. We discussed how novelty and the learning curve of interaction technologies relate to physical interaction. The results of the workshop were most impressive… and I think some of them could be really pushed further.
In 2008 there was an interesting issue of Interactions Magazine on innovation. The cover article by Dubberly provides a good conceptual models of innovation [1]. In my lecture on HCI I tyically also introduce the TRIZ („The theory of solving inventor’s problems“) methodology, introduced by the Soviet engineer and researcher Genrich Altshuller. TRIZ is interesting to me, as it is in contrast to many other creativity approaches,a systemtic (algorithmic) approach for generating innovative ideas and solutions for problem solving. However I am not sure how well it works in the real world…
During the workshop our approach was very practical. We did also a speed invention exercise – the task was to create 3 game concepts (related to physical penny games) within 10 minutes. The results were pretty impressive – perhaps someone has the time to implement them.

And being in Finland we got the real sauna experience – inside +79°C and then outside into the snow -23° – this is cool (in the very literal sense!).

[1] Dubberly, H. 2008. Toward a model of innovation. interactions 15, 1 (Jan. 2008), 28-36. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/133

Visiting TU-Berlin and T-Labs

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We have a number of student projects that look at novel applications and novel application platforms on mobile phones. As Michael Rohs from T-Labs is also teaching a course on mobile HCI we thought it would be a good opportunity to meet and discuss some application ideas.

I gave a talk in Michael’s lecture discussing the concept of user interfaces beyond the desktop, context as enabling technology, and future applications in mobile, wearable and ubiquitous computing. We had an interesting discussion – and in the end it always comes down to privacy and impact on society. I see this as a very positive development as it shows that the students are not just techies but that they see the bigger picture – and the impact (be it good or bad) they may have with their developments. I mentioned to books that are interesting to read: the transparent society [1] and total recall [2].

In the afternoon we discussed two specific projects. One was an application for informal social while watching TV (based on a set iconic communication elements) that can be used to generate meta data on the program shown. The other is a platform that allows web developers to create distributed mobile applications making use of all the sensors on mobile phones. It is essential a platform an API that provides access to all functions on the phones available in S60 phones over a RESTful API, e.g. you can use a HTTP call to make a photo on someone’s phone. We hope to release some of the software soon.

In the coffee area at T-labs was a printout with the 10+1 innovation principles – could not resist to take a photo 😉 Seems innovation is really trival – just follow the 11 rules and you are there 😉

[1] David Brin. The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom. Basic Books. 1999. ISBN-13: 978-0738201443. Amazon-link. Webpage: http://www.davidbrin.com/transparent.htm

[2] Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell. Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. Dutton Adult. 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0525951346. Amazon-link. Webpage: http://totalrecallbook.com/

Land of ideas – Award for the innovation factory at the University of Duisburg-Essen

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Every day per year one place or institution is Germany is awarded „a place in the land of ideas„. This initiative is quite completive (each year well over 2000 institutions apply and the year has only 365 days…).

The innovation factory at the University of Duisburg-Essen has a really interesting vision and received the award for its concept of converting ideas into innovations and products. It promotes thinking in product rather and by this challenges researchers to look how their research results could enable new products or enhance existing products. I find this a most useful exercise – especially when having basic research results that are not directly linked to an application. To facilitate thinking in products they have a number of industrial designers that act as innovation scouts.

Such events always offer the official speeches (not my favorite part but I see one needs them) but also the chance to meet interesting people. I enjoyed the discussions – in particular one question I found interesting – whether or not the ebook reader based on eInk (now just entering the marked on massive scale) is already dead… and replace by the next generation of multimedia extra-thin wireless tablets.