Ianus Keller

Gust of me: reconnecting mother and son

The Gust of Presence conceptual design lets parents and children who live apart reconnect in a more friendship-based relationship. With two Gustbowls, parents and children can communicate in a simple way that requires little effort and could subtly become a part of their daily routines. Gustbowl is designed to promote and support informal, unobtrusive interactions in families whose members live apart. The Gustbowl helps families keep in touch, rather than just exchange information, by letting members be a part of each others daily routines. This lets them have the little encounters that are ordinary to members who live together yet are greatly missed by members who live apart. We describe how the Delft design team created the Gustbowl from user studies by developing the concept for and field-testing an experiential prototype.

Gustbowl: technology supporting affective communication through routine ritual interactions

The Gustbowl enables parents and out-of-house children to bring back the feeling of coming home and allow for low-threshold, uncomplicated communication through using an aesthetically pleasing product. Technology is used to reconnect mother and grown-up son, by anchoring communication in routine daily actions. Prototypes were tested over longer periods of time to develop and evaluate both the intended routine use and improvised focused use of the bowl.

For Inspiration Only

To find out how designers collect and use visual material, this PhD research project combined working prototypes, theories and methods from different disciplines and contextual observations in a ‘research through design’ approach.

Supporting informal collections of digital images: organizing, browsing and sharing

Digital techniques are rapidly becoming popular for the recording of images, but current applications for handling image collections still lag behind the varied and fluent ways of interacting that traditional informal collections offer. In this paper we report a field study of how home users use traditional ways of storing and organizing their personal photo collections. We compare this to the possibilities and limitations of current tools for digital image collections. Findings indicate that the interfaces of current digital tools provide excellent support for solution-oriented indexing, but limited support for browsing and storytelling. Finally, an alternative interface is presented which combines real world interaction with the possibilities of new media for interacting with digital images.

Connecting mothers and sons: a design using routine affective rituals

Beauty is in the details. Often small things carry an important emotional undertone that determines whether or how we enjoy an event or a product. In this article, we describe how small details of everyday routines were incorporated in the design of a hi-tech communication appliance. As ID-StudioLab’s entry to the Microsoft Research Design Expo 2003, the student team “Mamasboys” wanted to design a communication appliance that would enhance the affective value of the communication between relatives living far apart. The students all had experienced such situations when they left their parents behind to pursue their university education. Most communication devices we use nowadays are designed for focused, conscious use. Often the primary concern is functionality: telephones with voicemail, for instance, are designed around the process of sending and storing fragments of audio. However, people typically communicate in a richer context, where functional, emotional, and social relationships are interwoven. Products which do not take this into consideration in the design process, and which are purely functional, fail to fulfill our needs. Communication devices, in particular, need to reflect and support the emotional bonds between family members, rather than only transmit factual information. Such a device would have to be less imposing, but fully engaging and flexible enough to blend in with the everyday rituals of parent and child.

Interactive pong: exploring ways of user inputs through prototyping with sensors

This study aimed to explore ways of user inputs through designing interactive game controllers with different type of sensor. From building four experiential prototypes on Pong, we learned to drive design by focusing on interaction qualities, which determine the use of sensors. We found that the interaction qualities together as a set offer a way to design aesthetics of behavior in interaction.

Designing trajectories of experiences: in museums, around museums or including museums

Recently, museums have increasingly become parts of ecosystems of people and organizations in their functioning. As a consequence, museum experience designers are stimulated to think in a holistic way, about experiences of people that engage with networks including the museum, as well as about the role of individual museums within such ecosystems (Vermeeren et al in Museum experience design – crowds, ecosystems and novel technologies, 2018a). This raises the questions of: What are ways in which a museum experience relates to experiencing its embedding context? And, what does this imply for the process of designing the museum experiences? In two design case studies, four ideas for museum experiences have been developed based on different ways in which museums relate to their embedded network. The ideas illustrate how the focus of the design may be different depending on the role the museum plays in the overall experience, and how the design process is complicated by having to deal with a larger group of stakeholders when designing. Finally, all ideas came forth from taking a broader view of the potential museum target group than seeing them solely as visitors to the museum. This was seen as crucial for inspiring solutions to museum experiences beyond more traditional museum visiting experiences.