I’m done with writing my thesis and you can find it here:
It’s a time management system design. Some of the keywords are: interaction, Android, mobile app, productivity tool, wrist device, perception of time
All presentations from the Swiss Design Network 2010 conference have been uploaded. Do take a look!
Feels weird to be listening to myself talk and present. As always I got very critical of myself when I saw the video! Dries pointed out that I could’ve summarised at the end instead of ending abruptly. Personally I could’ve done much better with the talking itself! Too many fill-errs and umms…
Traveling is stressful especially if one is alone – wake up on time for the breakfast, check out on time, catch the right bus that leaves for the airport and so on. But the joy is in managing all this, the chancing upon wonderful objects that you want to be in possession of while walking on the streets of a new place, the sighting of a fantastic composition for your camera, looking at a place through different eyes than the ones of the locals – being a tourist!
The conference was good and I met some very nice people there. Hopefully I’ll manage to keep in touch with them! I learnt some interesting things from keynote sessions and the workshop I attended. All in all, it was a pleasant eye opener and a good design ambience.
From Ruth Durrer’s keynote one thing that stuck was the various elements of innovating. Intuition, Making connections between unlikely but known elements and New perspective. These are probably known to us in an intuitive way, but the fact that she put it out there crystallised the thought and made it seem wonderful.
The ‘Time and Space workshop by Yu Seung Kim and Austin Lee was quite interesting and made me realise I have so much to learn as far as tools and skills are concerned!
My presentation was quite OK I felt. I could have done better. I missed out saying a couple of points. But it’s great that I got a chance to present at a conference nonetheless and speak to some talented people!
Why O Why
Basel was a cute little city, with fairs and festivity all over the place that made the place feel so vibrant and alive! The funny thing about Swiss is that instead of signs that point to the next city or town, it says “France”! It’s amazing and when I heard that people travel to France or Germany to shop, my eyes popped out in much more amazement!
Basel Dazzle
I managed to go to Vitra Design Museum on 31st and was very pleased with myself for having made the decision to go there instead of other museums. I wouldn’t have enjoyed art works being displayed as much as I enjoyed looking at product design and architecture! I even bought a couple of practical and well-designed, thoughtful objects at the Vitra Museum Shop. The structures of people I only read about during my architecture days filled my view and my phone’s camera lens! Gehry and Ando are at least two architects whose designs I could walk around at Vitra 
I missed Hadid’s fire station though. The Vitra Haus by Herzog and de Meuron I had the opportunity to walk inside of. That was another experience altogether.
Complex Haus
Vienna was a trip I’ve been dying to make since I took up architecture, for my favourite architects Coop-Himmelblau (Blue Sky Co-op) are from there. I have wanted to see their designs for real having gasped at the wonders in books and their website. Therefore my one day trip was quite different from the usual ones, for I spent a good 45 mins trying to locate them (I should’ve done that in advance!) on the map of Vienna and planning my trip based on that. I managed to see the usual touristy places along the way, but did not stop to take pictures or admire them much. I managed to see the Gasometer B, an apartment building and the bits of the Rooftop at Falkestrasse that were jutting out of the roof! I saw another apartment building but wasn’t sure if it was designed by them. I enjoyed looking for those buildings and admiring them. I chanced upon some interesting buildings in some parts of Vienna during my quest to look for Coop’s works.
Tilt my Imagination
This trip was a holiday that I never had during summer! I’m glad I managed to take time out and go to some new places. My next trip will be to Glasgow and London in Dec-Jan. Woo hooo!
Yes the blog part of my blog has been quite dormant for almost a year now.
But there’s NEWS now
My partner in crime for the user evaluation workshop we did at Rinnekoti-Säätiö, Dries De Roeck and I thought why not write a paper or two for some conferences around the globe, talking about our work and thoughts.
Then I came across Swiss Design Network conference through Julian Bleecker’s Near Future Laboratory. He is one of the keynote speakers at the conference.
We submitted the abstract, got through and now the paper is in the process of being published! The paper abstract can be seen here.
I’m yet to put my presentation together (oops!) and I’m to leave for Basel in two weeks!! On my way back, I will halt at Vienna overnight on 31st October.
I’ll share the presentation after the conference. Keep tuned in!
From The 3G Industry Summit In Kunshan, China: 16 Demos From Chinese Mobile Startups
Posted using ShareThis
The last company MOTECH, features a travel assistant for foreigners and tourists in China:
MoTech offers a mobile travel assistant for the millions of foreigners visiting China every year. The app comes with a set of around 1,000 different phrases the average tourist needs to feel comfortable in China (transportation, emergency situations, shopping etc.). Choose the sentence and let your mobile phone speak it out loud in Mandarin Chinese (the app also lists points of interests and the names of restaurants). In his presentation, Motech CEO Austin Xie also touched upon the slew of other interesting products and solutions for Non-Chinese speaking people his company provides.
I found this the particularly interesting as I’d worked on something similar in a Mobile Experiences course recently at Media Lab, Helsinki
Will share the concept, once I know I’m allowed to show it out in the open!
If you were curious about the feedback I got, here it is. I’m pasting the mail. It ain’t too bad, but I was of course expecting something more even in terms of feedback. At least my scores are the way I expected them to be – higher score on Innovation and Interaction, as these were the categories I was aiming for. Before you start reading the mail, thanks to everyone who voted for me
—————————————————————————————-
Dear Anusha Iyer,
Thank you again for your participation in the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Summer 09. As mentioned earlier – this Design Challenge was an overwhelming success – which is in large part due to your enthusiasm, your ideas and creativity!
A quick word on the voting process – we grouped all entries (ordered alphabetically by name of contributor) and the nine panelists into three groups. Then each panelist in a group would vote on each concept in his group. Voting was done on a 1-10 scale (with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest score) in each of the four categories innovation, interaction, execution and producible. We calculated the average score for each concept per category and moved the top 10 entries into the second round of voting. In this second round all nine panelists ranked the entries in each category from top to bottom. Again we calculated the average ranking for each concept, which then led to the ‘Best in Class’ ranking. Further panelists could leave individual comments for each concept.
Your individual ratings for ‘Green T and drag+drop tabs’ are:-
Panelist #1
– Innovation: 7
– Interaction: 5
– Execution: 6
– Producible: 6
– Comments: ./.-
Panelist #2
– Innovation: 5
– Interaction: 6
– Execution: 5
– Producible: 5
– Comments: ./.-
Panelist #3
– Innovation: 7
– Interaction: 6
– Execution: 4
– Producible: 4
– Comments:
Thanks for participating in the Design Challenge!
Very nice presentation, and you have some interesting ideas.
– Grouping is definitely something a lot of people want, so I’m happy to see you tackle this.
– I like the fact that there is no separate “management mode” for groups, you just create them organically by drag/drop- Multiple levels of tabs (“tabs of tabs”) is a bit much.
– The “T” isn’t very discoverable or predictable.
The ‘People’s Choice’ voting was done on a simple ‘one vote per person’ basis. Your concept received a total of 27 valid votes.
You’ll find some more general stats on the Design Challenge voting on Pascal’s blog: http://bit.ly/design_challenge
Warm regards,
-Pascal on behalf of the Design Challenge team
We hear about people multitasking or wanting to multi task. I realised I’m one of those wanna-be multi-taskers. I usually have a long to-do list which contains everything from wash the dishes to update blogs and work-related tasks.
Instead of allotting time for each and striking them off as I complete, I end up losing interest in one and suddenly jump to another leaving the previous task unfinished. Unsure if I should blame the information and digital age or my own inability to focus on one thing for more than 20 mins.
I was updating another blog when I realised my mind wandering to my ways of working and decided to post about it here!
What if parts of webpages on which the work is being done can be brought into focus and the rest of it is blurred out. I say this because even while I was writing this, my eyes went to the post tags section of this page and I was wondering about tags on my other posts and this!
Alright, I think I’ve wandered enough and it’s time to get back to the real task at hand. And I’m going to try and not think of myself as uber-cool and stick to doing one thing at a time, to increase efficiency
Yes yes.. it is up, my concept. Now I’m waiting for feedback
It’s a mixed feeling when I see some big company or well-known person actually executes an idea that I got. I learnt during school that similar innovation, ideas and thoughts can spring up simultaneously in many people’s minds. Still learning though to cope with the idea that someone else did it before me!
Ok..no the entire idea of wave didn’t hit me, just parts… more importantly it’s the integration of Tasks and Calendar that happened recently that kinda got to me. Of course I realise that I wouldn’t have been alone to think of something like that. But yea, that’s exactly what I need to learn to cope with!
It’s a mixed feeling cos it’s Google who did it. I love the way they think, cos most often ‘we’ think alike. Which means their products are intuitive
