Oli: Fostering Human Connections

Plug-In-Play is an interactive installation consisting of an architectural scale projection and a series of networked input platforms representing a playful take on the future of the connected city. It was the central installation of the 2010 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, CA by the LAB at Rockwell Group.

Out of the 39 million blind people around the world, only 10% know how to read/write in braille. Even those who know braille cannot understand the shapes of many objects around them. Through Fittle, we are trying to make visually challenged children learn braille letters, spellings of words, and shapes/forms of the objects that these words represent—all at the same time, engaging them through a puzzle.

FiDO is a circular physical interface connected with a mobile app, which is a plug-in to different semi-autonomous vehicles. FiDO collects driver data and traffic information to give personal recommendations. Consequently, drivers can provide active feedback by rotating FiDO during their drive. This entire process is represented in purple and blue gradients to communicate what the vehicle is processing.

There are 1.8 billion population of Muslim, where the largest Muslim population resides in Indonesia. Muslims do their prayers five times a day, and they have to be clean to do their prayers. On Hadith Sahih Muslim, Prophet Muhammad said “Cleanliness is part of the imaan (faith)”

When we discuss problems in policing, we rarely indict the records management software. There’s a common misconception that police are “high tech” when, in reality, 20% of departments are still using paper reports to file incidents. The rest are using outdated software that makes it impossible to share crime information across city lines. Problematic software has even resulted in criminals walking free based on technicalities like arrests not being processed in time. This was a decades old problem that no one else bothered to fix despite hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars being spent each year on it. With Cobalt Records Management System, the team at Mark43 redesigned police reporting workflows from the ground up, and built a user experience that officers could finally embrace instead of complain about.

TAMI is a tangible interface that facilitates learning the basics of trigonometry. As opposed to the traditional way of teaching trigonometry (and mathematics in general), TAMI enables an intuitive, playful, and collaborative approach to learning.

Every summer, a team of scientists from Queen Mary University travels to Cape Verde where they deploy sensors and trackers on nesting loggerhead turtles, to track them and understand their complex and mysterious behavioral patterns as they return to the ocean. The scientists came to Wolf In Motion to help make the complex data gained from the turtles more usable and understandable.

The ubiquity of security cameras in our world suggests we have become compliant being constantly recorded in public spaces. Yet privacy and data retention are hot topics and have made designers very much aware that their design choices affects what kind of data society we will become. In this current context, a growing group of designers worry about the dark side of automated data recording. This project explores ways in which recording data in public spaces can be used in a positive, constructive, and privacy-respecting way, to the benefit of the users of that space. We hope it can function as an antidote to the current (necessary, but often negatively framed) discussion on automatic data recording in public space.

When Nike Basketball came to us to help them deliver on their mission to help young athletes elevate their performance, our first step was to understand how kids try to improve their game. Our ethnographic research revealed a key insight: fledgling players hone their skills by watching their basketball idols, and mimic their signature moves in order to appropriate pros’ moves and personalize them to suit their own unique style. At the inaugural World Basketball Festival at the legendary Rucker Park in Harlem, we created The Film Room, a live event where aspiring players not only learn from the very best, they make the moves on their own, and learn about their performance. The Film Room is part green screen, part half court, 100% education. Kids watch a pro performing a signature move, and with the help of Nike coaches, analyze each step. Next, they try to perform the move themselves on the half-court. As they perform the move, HD cameras capture their movements and a custom-built algorithm breaks down each frame. Within minutes, participants receive a personalized 18 x 24” Nike Basketball poster, starring themselves.

BlindMaps – An open initiative for independent mobility.We are building a low-cost navigation system for the blind and visually impaired so that everyone can have the freedom of independently exploring and navigating in an urban environment.