Dundee visit

April 29th, 2009 by rbanks

The Product Design and Interactive Media Design students at Dundee University are participating in Microsoft’s Design Expo (part of the 2009 Faculty Summit) for a second year in a row. These are 2nd year undergraduate students (see my notes and the student presentation from last year), working to combine the brief we’ve set around “Work” with their goals of getting some ethnographic experience studying their grandparents, learning electronics, designing network objects and so on.

All 8 teams did an amazing job in their presentations, putting together their videos, as well as actually generating and developing their ideas into working prototypes and renderings.

Well done to all of them, as well as specifically to the Social Sewing group who’ll be going on to present their project in Redmond in July.

Thanks to Tim Regan for taking the following shots while we were there:

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The Rock Church

April 26th, 2009 by rbanks

Amazing place. I have more shots up on my Flickr account.

The Rock Church by rbanks.

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Robots that need help

April 16th, 2009 by rbanks

I really likethis idea by Kacie Kinzer of “robots” ( she calls them tweenbots) that rely on the kindness of strangers to get from A to B.

"The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

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