All Of Us
I was invited last weekend to the MadInSpain Design Conference held in the Palacio de los Congresos in Madrid. It has been a pleasure being there, organisation was great and all interventions were brilliant. I know they will post the videos sometimes soon and will surely keep you updated on that.
As for now though, I would love to focus on the intervention from Nick Cristea of AllOfUs who really blew me away and whose work go beyond usual graphic/interactive design to embrace traditionally untouched areas such as museums and hospitals. To achieve good response from those publics, unused to technology, they create simple, playful solutions that mimic and engage natural behaviours and often start from familiar objects. The result is exceptionally bright, always very simple and show that interactive design can be something open, warm and serve people. The only thing you might like to question is the sustainability of such high-end, delicate technology.
All case were very impressive and very inspirational (I would love to see more of the installation they did at The Tate Britain to go through the lines and strokes of Faulkner’s paintings). Here’s a quick view on two of them.
Harefield Hospital
Asked by a hospital to modernise their waiting room, they created a whole interactive environment to accompany the patient during his wait before the operation.
First, they talked with the patients and found out 2 conclusions. One, people always come back to nature when they’re about to enter what could be their last grasp on life. Two, in a hospital you tend to lose control of everything: they remove your clothes, your watch, and then you often lay down in a bed without knowing what’s going on.So they installed (in the waiting room but also all the way to the operation room) a nature-inspired decoration (principally made of wood) with interactive screens displaying open air sceneries (a lake with a fisherman, birds in the sky). And to give back some control, patients were given a very straightforward remote control and could point the walls and affect the behaviour of the scenes: the fisherman would catch a fish, the sun would appear beyond the clouds.
And apart from the beauty of the solution, this new approach proves to be useful as relaxed patients tend to have smoother operations and faster recovery times.
Below a few stills from the video you can catch on their website.
Science Museum
Asked by the Science Museum to create a show stopping exhibit for a travelling exhibition on Physics, they came with a 3D video game world that kids could navigate by riding a bicycle and experience Einstein’s theories about gravity, light speed, photoelectric effects and more.
Once again a beautiful case that blend a familiar object (the bike), natural behaviours (running the bike), a simple metaphor (you physically enter Einstein’s brain) and a playful situation that perfectly meets the objectives of the project.
Links:
AllOfUs website.
Day-by-day review of the MadInSpain event (in spanish) from the guys of More Coffee Please here and here.
Conference pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/hipocondriaca
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