Sniffing out the Differences

Philips Pediatric Coaching is a holistic coaching solution to prepare and guide children (ages 4 to 8) for an MRI scan. It consists of a gamified mobile app to prepare children at home; an educational toy scanner to prepare kids in the waiting room; and guidance in the bore of the MRI scanner. All solution elements feature the same buddy characters (Ollie & friends) & design elements, as well as the same voice, so kids are consistently guided from home to the scanner. The app has been co-created with clinical experts and psychologists and features educational videos, interactive games, information for parents, and an Augmented Reality-experience.

Since 2002, the Institute for Emerging Issues (IEI) has engaged North Carolina’s citizens, bringing people together to turn ideas into action. Experts at facilitating face-to-face communication, they wanted to extend their impact using digital tools. They envisioned an exhibit designed to educate North Carolinians about four of the state’s core concerns­–Education, Environments, Economy, and Health–and inspire and enable them to collaborate on these issues. Working with IEI and our partners, we created the Emerging Issues Commons at North Carolina State University’s Hunt Library.

UFOcus addresses the challenges faced by students, particularly those with attention disorders, in a traditional classroom setting. It proposes an interactive and participatory learning system for Primary and middle School classrooms. Using light signals, projections and sound cues to guide students through different stages of the lesson, ensuring they remain attentive and aware of their progress. Each student has access to tokens and tiles, allowing them to actively participate, answer questions, and engage with peers at appropriate times. The system also introduces ice-breaking activities and de-stressing games, encouraging both mental and physical involvement.

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 The rest are using outdated software that makes it impossible to share crime information across city lines.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.

A pavement brings to life an old emirati tradition in a way that gets strangers to create music together. For centuries, Dubai fishermen made a living diving into the sea looking for pearls, known as the “local gold”. Pearl Divers is an interactive plaza dotted with pearl-like sensors that play music with participant’s shadows. Paying tribute to this ancient tradition, passersby trigger original Bayati and Hijaz melodies, bringing magic and connection to the heart of an emerging neighbourhood.

Smart home cameras are one of the most popular consumer smart product categories. They’re used for many tasks, such as deterring intruders, monitoring kids and pets, and knowing when packages have arrived. But they also create serious privacy concerns and social tensions between the primary users who own them and a diverse category of people we refer to as adjacent users , like neighbors, tenants, domestic workers, and public bystanders.

New drug therapies and medical devices save lives. In some cases, patients wait for years to participate in a clinical trial for a new drug or for that drug to come to market. It takes over a year just to complete study startup, the process of getting all the hospitals, private practices, and government health institutions that are part of a clinical trial ready to see patients. Why? Study startup is burdensome and complex–a large number of documents have to be routed and approved, and many regulatory requirements have to be met. Communication happens mostly through time-consuming methods like phone, email, and fax.

Color Tone is a set of tools, for people who are deaf or hard of hearing in Costa Rica, to experience the physicality of sound. It allows them to access sound and the information it contains by experiencing it through sight and touch. They can also use it with hearing people and share their experiences and feelings.

eCare is a platform that helps caregivers arrange their work, while also reducing their workload by analyzing transportation times between work locations; alleviating the care pressure for all parties.

Earth Bits is a data-driven journey to raise collective awareness around the environmental crisis, allowing visitors of maat - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon - to experience climate change from scientific evidence. Earth Bits stimulates reflection on the relationship between science, humanity, nature, and technology in a very objective way. It shows the energetic transition and the current crisis, inviting visitors to explore the intrinsic relationship between people and the planet, understanding the repercussions of our choices and the impact of our actions. As designers, we facilitate the flux and translation of data as fuel for creating knowledge, cultural value, and critical thinking. Not merely providing information or solutions, but creating a new grammar of understanding, to read the complexity of our fast-changing time. Visitors can explore and experience knowledge with all their senses in the storytelling of four parts: four digital and interactive installations, graphics, animated videos compiled with data based on scientific evidence. An example of this approach is a digital wallpaper “painted” with data from the ESA – European Space Agency’s Copernicus program Sentinels (satellites to monitor our planet) that visually translates the scientific information for the public. The video – updated every month – shows the correlation between CO2 emissions by human activity, global warming, and natural phenomena such as floods, ice melting, rising sea levels.