Ufocus Enhancing Classroom Learning with an Inclusive and Tailored Digital Interactive Experience

GreatSchools Local is a community school guide that helps specific cities connect with parents to help them get their kids a great education. Today we reach over 1.5 million families in 8 communities

Story Tree is a project that encourages children to express themselves and create their own stories. In this project, our mission statement is to establish an appealing storytelling experience for children and guide them to create their own stories. Through telling stories, exercise children’s imagination and expression ability, guide them to develop the habit of thinking and creating, and establish a closer family relationship through parent-child interaction.

Out of the Box is a simple yet effective solution for the increasing number of cell-phone users who have difficulties with learning to use a new smartphone. For older people, this experience can be particularly frustrating as they apply analogue modes of learning to digital experiences - looking in the box for help that simply is not there. Rather than design a dumbed down “special phone”, the designers decided to look at the problem in a different way. Instead of designing another device, they looked at changing the way people learn to use them. By drawing on user strengths and familiar mental models, the designers created a set of books which would act as the packaging and provide an entire learning experience for any device. The books actually contain the phone, and use each page turn to reveal the elements of the phone in the right order, helping the user to set up the sim card, battery and even slide the case onto the phone. The phone then slots into the book, which acts as the main manual. Arrows point to the exact locations the user should press, avoiding confusion and eliminating the feeling of being lost in a menu.

For me, this selection was about the future, right? It's about where I hope interaction design will go. And the promise here is always, for me, about interdisciplinarity, about telling a story, about our capacity to imagine what the world might be, not what the world is. And this selection, for me, reflects all of those things. So for me, this was recipient exemplifies some of the things that I think are really important about where we're moving as a community.

The main purpose for indoor climate systems is to create healthy environments with clean air and agreeable temperature for people’s well-being. Functionalities and features to improve air quality is evolving, and our increased environmental consciousness puts new demands on energy efficiency, as well as lowering cost and the overall environmental footprint.As one of the top innovative companies in the ventilation industry, Swegon faced a challenge with their new generation air handling units. Over the years, more and more features had been added making it increasingly complex and difficult to handle. It required professionals with extensive experience to navigate and handle the large number of settings needed to stage for a world-class indoor climate and also saving energy. Important functions were not being used, because many vital features were hidden and the users never understood how to use them or that they even existed. In 2010 Swegon engaged Veryday to help them transform an overloaded control system into a user-friendly control unit. Besides turning complex into simple they wanted this new control unit to play a key role in the overall brand experience.

Middle school education can be very challenging for students. They get introduced to a lot of new mathematical and scientific concepts that are often abstract in nature and difficult to understand. The current education system is designed as a one size fits all solution, with a set way to teach and learn these concepts. This approach contrasts with facilitation and letting learning happen organically. What if these concepts could be made more fun and tangible? Would this help the students gain more confidence in learning these concepts, let them explore the subject matter more deeply, and help them develop their own reasoning behind them? The “Smart Lamp” addresses this opportunity space by creating a mixed-reality environment that brings together the advantages of both physical and virtual environments.

Simple is an app that helps busy clinicians to manage hypertensive patients by tracking their blood pressure and medications and ensuring, through regular check-ups, that patients stay on treatment. The India Hypertension Control Initiative (IHCI), aims to improve hypertension control by 25% by the year 2025, in order to drastically reduce heart attacks and strokes, which kill millions of Indians. Simple is a key component in that effort.

In every vision of near future homes, households products are those ones that are connected to each other and always working together in harmony, creating that perfect, modern, and yet somewhat boring scenario. However connectivity changes not only the way we interact with objects, but also their meaning in our life. From tools they can became agents or companions with their own behaviour, motives and agency.

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.

Tink is a toolkit that allows kids to engage with familiar objects in new ways. The kit includes six sensors (light, sound, tilt, vibration, motion, temperature), six plugs, and an iPad application that connects the sensors with the plugs.