Expressive Wearable

Of late, one of the biggest issues that India, the second most populous country of the world, is facing is of women safety. The country’s capital, New Delhi, has recently reported a high number of rape cases against women. Protests from citizens have lead to higher vigilance from the police to prevent such cases in the future.

With the advent of Precision Farming, agriculture has become fully mapped and will transform farming to a highly digital activity. This in combination with other changes underway in the countryside, mainly the paradigm shift from food to biogas production and various EU subsidy schemes to promote diversity, will lead to disruptive changes within the next few years for the (European) countryside.

Programming is intimidating. Common programming stereotypes involve sitting at a computer looking at lines of dense symbols and code. This perception discourages people, particularly children, from learning programming.Dr. Wagon dispels these impressions and facilitates a new way to learn programming that is interactive and concrete. Dr. Wagon was designed for children ages 6-12, and is intended to provide children with a playful and more accessible introduction to computer programming.

How can we facilitate conversations around health and make them more meaningful for patients and their supporters? Reflect is a game-like conversation app that provides a playful platform for patients and their supporters to engage in meaningful conversations around health. It provides them with a template to ask sensitive but important questions to make better health decisions. It also helps them set up goals and co-work as a team in overcoming their challenges.

MixDown is a digital service for young adults to engage with radio in an innovative way. The service allows youth to express themselves by creating short audio mash-ups using radio clips, repurposing and mixing the content with personalized messages.

Mobile is intense, intimate, and frequent: the ultimate medium to connect with consumers and gain their loyalty. In order to preserve its role as a supermarket pioneer and innovator, the mobile application 'Appie' was launched in 2009. It's now available for iPhone and Android (and the web, which is outside the scope of this submission) and is still being expanded with new and useful features. With Appie, users' experience around grocery shopping is elevated to a fun, inspiring, and easy process by taking the classic shopping list to a whole new level. Before going shopping, users can browse a database of tens of thousands of recipes, find stores near them, check opening hours, and create their shopping list using numerous 'sources': previous purchases, special offers, recipe ingredients, a bar code scanner, and manual and voice input. The list can even be synchronized across devices, enabling people to work together on the weekends' groceries. In an Albert Heijn store, Appie will help customers find the most efficient route by sorting the items on the list in the right order. And after shopping, users can switch to Cooking Mode, making it easy to follow the steps of recipes, using the ingredients they just bought.

In 2010, airlines were disappointing customers even while they were posting profits. It was clear that something needed to change. Armed with the insight that travel can be complicated, but the tools shouldn’t be, Delta set out to transform the way people experience flying.

When developing SquareTalk, our goal was to explore ways that we could use tacit technologies to foster a sense of connectedness between strangers at large-scale festival events.

New York City’s municipal website, NYC.gov, serves more than 35 million unique visitors per year and gets over 250 million page views annually. It’s the primary resource for New Yorkers to accomplish tasks such as paying parking tickets or determining the right school for their child, and for the city to share its initiatives and accomplishments with its citizens. It had not been redesigned since 2003 and, over time had become a disorganized hodgepodge of text and links. It had become difficult for users to find what they needed, and they were increasingly calling 311 (the city’s public help line). The city had already started to invest in a new technology infrastructure and make city data more open and accessible – this was the final effort to bring more power, information, and transparency to the people of New York. Our goal was to create a more intuitive, usable, and efficient experience that would be easy to search and browse, and a delight to use. The experience had to beat accessibility standards and work in many different languages. At a higher level, our goal was for NYC.gov to set the standard for the way governments communicate with and empower their people.

This project was created as part of investigating how silicone can be used as a medium for soft robotics and HCI.