GreatSchools Local

For nearly 70 years, we have been interacting with computers using a keyboard, and for the past few decades with a mouse. With the rise of touchscreen technology and the Internet of Things, we’re long overdue for a more intuitive way to create and work with technology.

Xiangyang Xin, PhD, founder of XXY Innovation, Professor at Tongji University. Xin holds a PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University with interests in interaction, experience, service, and organization design, and looks at how design contributes to transformations of lifestyles, businesses and cultures. He had founded MDes Interaction Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and served as former Dean of Design at Jiangnan University and acted as a guest professor in both design and business schools at several universities.

ZocDoc's purpose is to empower patients to be more engaged and empowered with their healthcare planning and decision-making.ZocDoc is a digital platform that provides patients unprecedented access to healthcare. ZocDoc's core feature, online booking, enables patients to find great doctors who take their insurance, view those doctors' availability online, and instantly book an appointment with the doctors they choose.ZocDoc goes even further by providing tools that empower patients to complete their medical/registration forms online, make follow-up appointments, and manage their ongoing health care. Whereas most healthcare technologies focus on building software for physicians and often treat the patient user experience as an afterthought, ZocDoc's focus is on making the entire patient-doctor relationship easier, more transparent, and above all more patient-centric.In fact, the driving philosophy behind ZocDoc's design is "Patients First". The goal is to transform how we think about healthcare by, for the first time ever, putting patients truly in control.

The BioDesign Studio is a new permanent exhibition created by The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose and NYC-based experience design studio, Local Projects. For the first time ever, it makes the burgeoning — and complex — fields of synthetic biology, bioengineering, biological design and DIY biology accessible to the public in an engaging and tangible way. To demystify these cutting-edge fields and technologies, visitors are able to play, tinker and design with the building blocks of life…literally.

What The Block is a project which is all about engaging people through design to learn and discover the potential of new technologies. We started out with Blockchain, since designers working with Blockchain, we had been inundated with requests from colleagues, peers, clients, family, and friends to explain Blockchain – the problem was we couldn’t find any good existing material out there.

Teemo’s goal is to bring “fitness fun with friends” to the large, stressed-out, and underserved portion of the population who want to exercise but don’t. Conceived, funded, designed, developed, and launched by Ammunition in partnership with Bonnier R&D, Teemo is a fitness adventure game that combines proven training techniques, social connection, and entertaining adventures to help people get and stay moving. From a design perspective, Teemo is above all an experiment in moving beyond conventional (often cynical) approaches to gamification and social computing. From the start, we set our sites on something better than points schemes, leaderboards, peer pressure, life logging, and self-quantification. Ultimately, we took inspiration from the notion that the greatest source of happiness and motivation is caring, stable, and supportive connections to close family and friends. Teemo’s big idea is so simple, we think it’s radical. Getting together with friends to have fun in ways that also happen to increase overall fitness.

The ʻI Want To Beʼ course is a 2-month after-school program for 12-15 year olds, designed to open the minds of children in Ghana to the career opportunities around them. The class, led by a teacher, takes children on a trip of (self) discovery through company visits, interviews, talent quizzes, and group assignments. An interactive computer application supports the class, tracking kidsʼ progress and showcasing companies and careers available in their communities. Children in Ghana have a narrow view of career options. When researching kidsʼ ambitions, most children told us they wanted to be a ʻdoctorʼ or ʻlawyerʼ and that they didnʼt want to be a ʻdrug dealerʼ or ʻbank robberʼ. In reality, most children leave school at 16 and take a low-paying job to help out with the family finances. This course gives children and their parents the chance to explore realistic career goals and understand paths to achieve them. As a result, children and families may reach higher in terms of education and career and contribute to the long-term skills needed to develop Ghana – and eventually other developing nations.

Living in developed countries with superior infrastructures and seemingly unlimited access to the ubiquitous things, we tend to forget: resources are not infinite and need to be taken care of. Current smart home solutions for regulating and optimizing consumption give little to no information to the user on their behavior and routine. Although every device in our home is a data touchpoint, hardly any of this is reflected in our living space, where we most need it.

Can Metaverse today replace reality? As the global COVID-19 pandemic distanced humans from each other, an expedition for new ways of communication began to rise. The concept of ‘Metaverse’ became widespread as a solution. However, VR interaction methods developed so far are biased toward audiovisual aspects. There should be more elements to reproduce for actual communication. Considering the early concept of VR suggested in Stanley Weinbaum’s 1935 SF novel <Pygmalion Glasses>, which included vision, hearing, touch, heat, and smell, humanity is still half as successful.

21 Balancoires (21 Swings) is an urban scale collective instrument, a game where together we achieve better things than separately. The installation consists of a series of 21 musical swings. When in motion, each swing triggers different notes. When used all together, the swings compose a musical piece in which certain melodies emerge only through cooperation. It's a game where, from the start, you need to adjust to the actions of others.The notes that are played are determined by how high a person swings. The color of the swing indicates the instrument it plays: piano, harp, guitar, vibraphone. The instruments are distributed differently within each set of three swings to create different musical configurations.When multiple swings move in synchronicity, a mini scale is played, revealing more notes and melodies. When all swings are in use, a secret musical mode is activated to give a special reward to players a synthesizer sound plays on all swings and transforms the experience.The result is a giant collective instrument that stimulates ownership of the space, bringing together people of all ages and backgrounds, and creating a place for playing and exchanging in the middle of the city center.