The Interaction Design Institute Ivrea presented Exit – 19 projects that exhibited exciting future scenarios in interaction design. Exit celebrated and saluted the work of students that arrived from over ten different countries to study at Ivrea.
For their final year, the students designed projects that took cues from audio, products design, mobile and wireless technology, fashion, film sports, graphic design and even theatre. The students designed innovative working prototypes as part of their year-end thesis. Among the many products was a combined holistic health monitor and advisor that dispenses tea appropriate to one’s current health and Design Improve – a service to be used by design companies and their clients to facilitate the design process.
One of my favourites is Pronto, a navigation and communication system for car drivers that would be exceedingly handy during the traumatic rush-hours in Dubai. Pronto not only plans the entire route but offers traffic updates as well as regulates its communication channel to prioritise the destination contact, scheduled contacts, and the frequent contact list. The current interface includes a touch-screen, ‘head-up’ projection on the windscreen, and a dashboard-mounted progress-bar display.
Steven Blyth’s The Social Fabric would thrill any social butterfly. The Social Fabric is a representation of one’s social world, displayed as a single visual array on a cellular phone. While no alternative to an address book or calendar, it subtly updates you on which relationships are thriving in your social network, which are being neglected as well as and the overall state of your social fabric.
Also Tazaki’s InstantShareCam merits a mention. Combing hardware specification and a software application, it permits groups of people armed with a camera to shoot and edit videos on the fly. An on-screen intuitive interface together with uncomplicated controls, offers each group to see what the others are shooting and help decide which video-stream takes precedence, etc.
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