All projects are working interactive demos that use the Make Controller in combination with our NET Lab Toolkit (Pen & Book didn’t use the Make).

Net Desk - Chris Becker & Ryan D’orazi 
Focuses on the affordances of paper comps of magazine and other printed material. Each piece of paper is tagged, and acts as a vector into all of its versions, related documents, and relationships with the people and files that created the content of the page. By swiping the paper over different areas of the desk, the user instantly sees these different aspects of the page on a large screen. Reflects the activities of real-world magazine production. Paper, custom built table, Barcode reader, Wii controller, 50″ display, light sensors.

Whisper Stones - Kylan Coats
Plays with the idea mythical character of the stone by allowing people to lean down, pick up a one of several stones, and anonymously leave or hear and audio message. Small and large stones, $10 radio shack solid state recorders, switches.

Pen and Book - Chris Lauritzen & Hunter Sebresos 
Explores and embraces the affordances of pen and paper by imagining simple, non-precious, mass produced and cheap digital pens and e-books. Enables the user to write on standard paper, yet instantly email the new document. Also, mark up a book and access the notes with any reader, anywhere. Paper, modified ball-point pen, Wacom tablets, projector, Flash, AppleScript.

Memory Apparatus – Hyun Yang
Inverts the “problem” of ubiquitous surveillance video, and demonstrates how people can access the histories of their own lives through the near future of continuous video capture of everything, everywhere. By rotating the two axis of the Astrolabe like object, one can dial in moments and locations of your life, seeing yourself from the perspective of a surveillance camera. Knob, Wii controller, video.

Postgeheimnis (The mail project) – Christiane Holzheid & Julia Tsao
A series of speculations (some mocked up in video scenarios, others prototypes) that explores ideas for applying some of the beneficial affordances of traditional mail and packages to electronic forms of mail. For example, in one of the working prototypes, an authorized friend is able to leave a video message for you and assign it to an object (e.g. a lamp) in your home. The lamp blinks when a message is waiting, and you simply touch the lamp see the video message played back in place of the light cast by the lamp. Micro projector, speaker, pressure sensors, two computers, Flash media server.

Shop Conscious – Nicole Chan & Haelim Paek
A system that enables the shopper to rate and find more information as they shop. They can create different rating profiles for themselves, weighting sustainability, product quality, and social network criteria. It includes a portable and dressing room media component. iPhone with LiveView app streaming flash from laptop, proximity sensors, light sensor.

Brainstorming Egg – Haemi Yoon
This project imagines a quarter sized projector that can be stuck to any surface (like your pant-leg) and turns it into a brainstorming area. Using a egg shaped object as the interface, the user can gesture to create a topic, manipulate media (e.g. scrub video), and make connections between ideas. Accelerometer, XBee wireless module, Wii controller in combination with Jonny Lee’s whiteboard software.

NetCreator – Austin Lee & Yoo Kyoung Noh
By imagining a future startup company, this project uses a series of video simulations and working prototypes to explore how everyday objects can mediate communications and create new meanings in their surroundings. For example, the working prototype demonstrated how a user could read information on their coffee cup, transfer that article to another person’s cup, send secret messages, or seamlessly transition from the short version on the cup to a full version displayed on an e-paper table. iPod Touch with LiveView app streaming flash from laptop, pressure sensor, projector, knob.

Update: Behind the scenes of the making of the video

Microsoft Office Lab’s Vision 2019 video

MDP Alumni Sebastian Bettencourt’s Beyond The Fold Newspaper Project

Here are links to several of my students’ past projects:

• 2004 – wall – scott nazarian, nikolai cornell
• 2005,2006 – mirror – in search of identity, infiniti interactive - nikolai cornell, phil van allen, others
• 2006 – interactive table – acura oracle – nikolai cornell, jonathan jarvis, phil van allen, others
• 2006 – handheld augmented reality – telepath – matt mcbride
• 2007 – e-paper newspaper – beyond the fold - sebastian bettencourt

In my current New Ecology of Things class, and in my upcoming research, we are working on an in-depth exploration of how people can work, play, and be entertained using digital affordances, yet moving away from the “mouse crouch” of sitting at a computer. One difference I have from the Microsoft vision is this: I believe each different activity can have its own set of affordances rather than the seeming standard ones envisioned in the Microsoft video. For example, writing an essay should be quite different from say, designing a website. I call this approach “anti-homogenous.” What we don’t need is a new ubiquitous interface and set of gestures. What we do need is gaining back some of the benefits of work and play spaces that are suited to the activity at hand.

This line of thinking was inspired by an article in Metropolis Magazine by John Hokenberry on an excellent new photography book by Michael Wolf called The Transparent City. The photos are studies of high-rises in Chicago, and show the uniformity of our current workplaces. An excerpt from the article:

The steel mill can’t be confused with the meatpacking plant or the typewriter-assembly factory. But here one has no idea of what goods or (more likely) services emerge from these cubicles and boardrooms.

Microsoft is proposing a new way of working, but in many ways, it is reproducing the idea of one-size-fits-all that’s embodied by operating systems like Windows. I’m not saying that Microsoft got it all wrong, they did a very good job up to a point. But perhaps we need to think beyond the homogenous approach. Instead, people need to be able to create their own work/play spaces that afford the kind of activities they are doing at the moment.  What would that heterogenous approach look like?

On April 25th 2008, Anne Burdick (MDP Department Chair), Nik Hafermaas (Dean of Communication Design @ Art Center) and I gave a talk at the USC Interactive Media Arts and Practice Program to discuss the MDP’s New Ecology of Things research initiative. This talk was webcast, and the web recording of it can be seen on Adobe’s education site.

American Honda and George P. Johnson have donated one of their Oracle Multi-touch Tables to the Media Design Program. We now have it permanently in our graduate studio where it is available for faculty and students to develop new applications. In particular, we’re interested in exploring how large sets of text and image content can be explored in a collaborative way with multiple users.