World Building Media Lab

Children love to solve mysteries and to play detective by tracking down hidden objects. PIIQ is an interactive DIY scavenger hunt kit that encourages children (6-8 years) to work together. It contains detective tools for role play, set of themes to build up on and design their own scavenger hunt and blank clue cards to add curiosity. Each child plays a different role in one team and they need to use their respective tools for unlocking the boxes to get to the next clue. By working together, children not only learn how to solve problems and communicate but also work on rebuilding their confidence around social skills and restoring their sense of community through meaningful and collaborative moments.

School in the Cloud takes Sugata Mitra’s vision for the future of education beyond the seven TED Prize Labs in the UK and India and turning it into a global movement for self-organised learning.

Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) kills over 350,000 people every single year in the U.S. alone. It is the leading cause of death for adults over the age of 40 and also leads to the loss of nearly 23,000 youth annually. Despite being a massive public health issue, survival rates have unfortunately remained dismal at around 10% for decades. Fortunately, there’s a treatment for Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) – a life-saving shock from an Automated External Defibrillator (AED). If used quickly, an AED can be highly effective. However, the problem is that AEDs are not readily accessible, and too often don’t get to the people who need them. Avive is on a mission to change that. With each passing minute prior to treatment reducing a victim’s chance of survival by 7%, an AED’s accessibility, design, and usability make the difference between life and death. Our strategic design collaboration with Avive focused on developing a first-of-its-kind connected AED system. In addition to a standard AED’s capabilities, the Avive Connect AED™ is a portable device that, when spread across a community, acts as a mesh-network of coverage enabling support to any individual within the radius of that network. When activated, the network of AEDs and local responders are alerted to find the closest AED to the victim. Once an AED is activated, it provides diagnosis and instruction to both professional and pedestrian users supporting a victim of sudden cardiac arrest.

Lumen tries to explore a new paradigm for interactivity and immersion. Imagine using Lumen inside a museum, an otherwise static/one sided experiences turns into an interactive experience that immerses you into the story. A visitor uses this enchanted flashlight to bring the exhibits to life, and they get to hear the story directly from the exhibit.

Soundline is a playful, social, sonic intervention which aims to investigate the potential for technology to influence the future of entertainment and the facilitation of the state of group flow within these spaces. Turning an “error” within the festival experience, into an opportunity for play and creative exploration, this roaming performance creates an environment that invites audiences to engage through music, dance and performance.

280 million people worldwide have diabetes causing 4 million deaths each year. With no cure on the horizon, daily self-management is the only option for sufferers to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Blood glucose levels must be tested several times a day and insulin dosage adjusted accordingly. While the technology to monitor blood glucose is improving, the cognitive and physical abilities of the (mostly older) patient group still present a major challenge. "For my patients who require insulin, the steps involved in the self-care of their diabetes can be complicated and overwhelming" -Diabetes Nurse (SanFrancisco) It often falls to nurses to overcome these usability obstacles - spending valuable consultation time training patients to use these devices instead of focusing on more important healthcare issues to prevent complications, e.g. blindness and amputations. In less developed healthcare systems, patients rarely get any training-leaving them frustrated by complex technology, procedures, and instructions that prevent them from effectively managing their diabetes, increasing their health risks. Roche Diabetes Care commissioned Frontend to analyze this issue. What are the usability barriers for patients and nurses? How could the process be simplified? How can we empower patients to manage their diabetes? How can we help nurses optimize training?

Every 30 seconds, someone in the US is hospitalized for heart failure. Once admitted to the hospital, there is an extremely high probability sufferers will be readmitted within the first 30 days of discharge. The disease becomes a steep downward slope from which patients struggle to gain control in their life and lifestyle.

Peel is TV, just for you. You tell Peel what you like, and Peel suggests programs you'll love to watch. A single tap on your iPhone takes you from looking for shows to watching them on your TV. With Peel, channels, sources, and remotes are irrelevant. The only thing that matters is your entertainment.

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.

Advances in computer vision and natural language AI continue to unlock new ways to explore the billions of images across our devices, websites, and the public domain. However, it remains difficult to express subjective concepts, such as visual tones (‘vibrant’) or moods (‘eclectic’) to current systems, where visual interpretation is shaped by culture and community and is personal to the individual.