DECO - designing comfort

This semester’s design task of the Human Computer Interaction seminar at DECO was to create, prototype and evaluate a location-aware mobile application that uses open data.
Five teams of three students each completed the seminar, resulting in creative, useful and sometimes also provoking use of fictitious open data. As open data in Austria is in its infancy (for more information visit open3.at or gov.opendata.at), teams had difficulties finding existing open (government) data sources. Some teams solved this problem by augmenting their application ideas with user-generated content as the main data source. The horizontal prototypes for the evaluation were implemented with various tools, including Titanium Mobile, Sencha Touch and also native development on iOS and Android platforms.

We proudly present the mobile application concepts of our five participating student teams. Note that most screens contain static data used only for the evaluation of the prototypes. The applications are (also if stated otherwise) not available on any store at the moment.

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An inspiring talk of Pranav Mistry about his “Sixth Sense” project at TEDIndia. Beside some other cool projects and great examples of real-world use cases of “Sixth Sense” he announces that the used software will be published open-source soon.

UX Booth has a nice overview of “The Future of Interface Design“.

Did you know the first “brain-tweet” was sent out this year? How about that we may someday be customizing windshields with widgets? In the not-to-distant future, we may be interfacing with computers in exciting and innovative new ways.

The 24h Student Design Challenge is part of this year’s OZCHI (the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group – SIGCHI) conference. It offers a great opportunity for students from around the world to participate in an international challenge about interaction design, and even win a travel scholarship to Melbourne, Australia for attending OZCHI.

In line with the conference theme “Design: Open 24/7″ the challenge is organised as two separate 24 hour events:

The first 24-hour event takes place online, on 12-13 September 2009. The three top entries will be published in the official conference proceedings. The winning team will be awarded a travel scholarship for attending OZCHI in Melbourne, to (partly) cover travel, accommodation and/or conference registration.

The second 24-hour event will take place at the OZCHI conference, in Melbourne, on 23-24 September 2009. The top three entries from this round will earn a Certificate of Recognition and prizes sponsored by our industry partners.

Registration for the online challenge is now open at: http://ozchi24.org

We proudly present a video summary of student projects from our HCI Seminar with special focus on multi-touch.