Daniel Saakes

When is role playing really experiential?: case studies

This paper presents and evaluates examples from our work with role playing exercises in design, both in design education and in our own design work. Rationales for role playing in design are: communication within the design process, the increase of technological complexity, the experience and empathy of designers, and the tangibility of interaction, and attentiveness to social change. They led us in developing role playing techniques for design ideation. Here, we reflect on the practical problems of integrating role playing exercises in design teaching and in a design process, and evaluate what hinders or aids the ability to engage with interaction experientially and empathically. Careful consideration of the actor-audience relationship, the setting, sufficient preparation for acting, and props emerge as important elements.

Mirror Mirror: An On-Body T-shirt Design System

Virtual fitting rooms equipped with magic mirrors let people evaluate fashion items without actually putting them on. The mirrors superimpose virtual clothes on the users reflection. We contribute the Mirror Mirror system, which not only supports mixing and matching of existing fashion items, but also lets users design new items in front of the mirror and export designs to fabric printers. While much of the related work deals with interactive cloth simulation on live user data, we focus on collaborative design activities and explore various ways of designing on the body with a mirror.

A tangible design tool for sketching materials in products

Abstract Industrial designers make sketches and physical models to start and develop ideas and concept designs. Such representations have advantages that they support fast, intuitive, rich, sensory exploration of solutions. Although existing tools and techniques provide adequate support where the shape of the product is concerned, the exploration of surface qualities such as material and printed graphics is supported to a much lesser extent. Moreover, there are no tools that have the fluency of sketching that allow combined exploration of shape, material, and their interactions. This paper evaluates Skin, an augmented reality tool designed to solve these two shortcomings. By projecting computer-generated images onto the shape model Skin allows for a “sketchy” tangible interaction where designers can explore surface qualities on a three-dimensional physical shape model. The tool was evaluated in three design situations in the domain of ceramics design. In each case, we found that the joint exploration of shape and surface provided creative benefits in the form of new solutions; in addition, a gain in efficiency was found in at least one case. The results show that joint exploration of shape and surface can be effectively supported with tangible augmented reality techniques and suggest that this can be put to practical use in industry today.

PacCAM: material capture and interactive 2D packing for efficient material usage on CNC cutting machines

The availability of low-cost digital fabrication devices enables new groups of users to participate in the design and fabrication of things. However, software to assist in the transition from design to actual fabrication is currently overlooked. In this paper, we introduce PacCAM, a system for packing 2D parts within a given source material for fabrication using 2D cutting machines. Our solution combines computer vision to capture the source material shape with a user interface that incorporates 2D rigid body simulation and snapping. A user study demonstrated that participants could make layouts faster with our system compared with using traditional drafting tools. PacCAM caters to a variety of 2D fabrication applications and can contribute to the reduction of material waste.

Slow display

How can we show our 16 megapixel photos from our latest trip on a digital display? How can we create screens that are visible in direct sunlight as well as complete darkness? How can we create large displays that consume less than 2W of power? How can we create design tools for digital decal application and intuitive-computer aided modeling?

A teleoperating interface for ground vehicles using autonomous flying cameras

Navigating remote robots and providing awareness of the remote environment is essential in many teleoperated tasks. An external view on the remote robot, a birds eye view, is thought to improve operator performance. In this paper we explore a novel design for providing such a third-person view for a ground vehicle using a dynamic, external camera mounted on a quadcopter. Compared to earlier methods that use 3D reconstruction to create third-person views, our approach comprises a true third-person view through a video feed. We so provide visually rich, live information to the operator. In an experiment simulating a search and rescue mission in a simplified environment, we compared our proposed design to a pole-mounted camera and to a traditional front-mounted camera. The third-person perspective provided by our flying camera and pole-mounted camera resulted in fewer collisions and more victims being located, compared to the front-mounted camera.

Mirror mirror: an on-body clothing design system

When choosing what to wear, people often use mirrors to try clothing items and see the fit on their body. What if we can not only evaluate items in front of the mirror but also design items and have them fabricated on the spot?

RippleTouch: initial exploration of a wave resonant based full body haptic interface

We propose RippleTouch, a low resolution haptic interface that is capable of providing haptic stimulation to multiple areas of the body via a single point of contact actuator. Concept is based on the low frequency acoustic wave propagation properties of the human body. By stimulating the body with different amplitude modulated frequencies at a single contact point, we were able to dissipate the wave energy in a particular region of the body, creating a haptic stimulation without direct contact. The RippleTouch system was implemented on a regular chair, in which, four base range speakers were mounted underneath the seat and driven by a simple stereo audio interface. The system was evaluated to investigate the effect of frequency characteristics of the amplitude modulation system. Results demonstrate that we can effectively create haptic sensations at different parts of the body with a single contact point (i.e. chair surface). We believe RippleTouch concept would serve as a scalable solution for providing full-body haptic feedback in variety of situations including entertainment, communication, public spaces and vehicular applications.

Material light: exploring expressive materials

The control of material appearance has become richer than before, giving designers new expressive freedom. Designers need tools and techniques to handle this freedom when designing products. We present a simple but powerful technique to explore material expression in the conceptual phase of the design process. Colours and patterns are projected on foam and paper models to enable designers to quickly visualise and judge materials in context of the products shape.

On the narrative structure of Virtual Reality walkthroughs

Architectural walkthroughs have often been presented as prime examples of applications that can benefit from Virtual Reality (VR) technology, but still VR presentations can be disappointing. A main reason for this is that most VR applications have been developed on purely technical criteria, with an emphasis on geometrical precision rather than experiential quality. In this paper we present a human-centered analysis and propose design solutions, by focusing on the narrative aspects of the walkthrough, such as connecting transitions of the kind used in contemporary computer games. The solutions show how such narrative enhancements can improve the user’s experience of presentations at modest technical expense.