soft Teddy - Nour Diab Yunes

Designer/Artist + Co-Creation

With the advent of new technologies and the rapid dissemination and accessibility of information, artists and designers develop increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking about the world in visual forms and of approaching open-ended questions or specific problems in new and exciting ways. It seems that design and art now represent blurred categorizations: artists and designers grow more apt at interchanging roles and are increasingly willing to collaborate and co-create.

“A Human-Centered Technology.” – Don Norman

While innovation has a historical contribution in terms of providing appropriate and efficient tools for society that help enrich human knowledge and enhance mental capabilities (memory, thought, reflection), it has however created modes of entertainment that increasingly promote a consuming rather than a productive people and is accountable for the apparent social divider between the haves and havenots of technology.

Introducing ‘Systems Thinking’

Systems Thinking teaches us how the design of a complex information system often needs to include mechanisms to account for “short term” and “long term” (or chronic) disturbances of flow caused by environmental changes, by dealing with the “whole” system rather than its parts. By creating systems able to adapt to environmental changes and thus to learn to sustain themselves in the face of unforeseen shifts, design can plan for more effective and efficient complex information systems. This is depicted primarily in the study of Cybernetics.

The Simplicity Shift – Scott Jenson

Scott Jenson defines 'feature blindness' as users being blinded by a feature list. He identifies the bottom-up approach of creating a user persona and a task scenario as more efficient than the top-down approach, in terms of organizing a commonsensical hierarchy of a product's features. The ideal visualization would be to 'tame' the feature list and prioritize features in accordance to a set of usage requirements and subsequent usage frequency.

TSL230R Light to Frequency Converter

This is a first try at using TSL230R to measure HRV (Heart Rate Variability) levels. It will be used as part of a larger project to collect users' heart rates and translate this data onto a mobile (potentially wearable) screen as a non-verbal messaging system that reveals a somewhat hidden state of 'being'.

Terri Timely’s Synesthesia