Thinkering with Hardware Workshop

March 28th - March 28th 2009 | Institute of Design, 350 N LaSalle St, 2nd Flr

Overview
This workshop will help interaction designers learn to “thinker” through tinkering with physical computing artifacts. The idea is to bring together talented individuals from the realm of interaction design, introduce them to new concepts/artifacts in the realm of physical computing, and allow them to put the two together. Most importantly, it will be an opportunity for interaction designers to get their hands dirty with electronics, soldering, and wiring, and learn how to interface hardware artifacts with virtual interactions. Each participant will receive a customized interactive hardware kit to work with and take home.

Faculty | Anijo Mathew Anijo Mathew is an Assistant Professor an the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. After his professional BArch from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi (India), he went on to complete an MDesS from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Prior to joining ID, he was a tenure track Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University's College of Architecture, Art, and Design (CAAD) where he taught in the graduate program and led the interaction design track at the Design Research and Informatics Lab (DRIL). He is currently working on a PhD at the Open University in the UK, exploring the intersection of computing and design. Anijo's research interests include interactive (computer mediated) spaces, immersive/responsive environments, environmental behavior, prototyping and HCI in the design process. His research falls within two broad categories - one a scholarship of pedagogy: looking at various methods and design mechanisms for the process of design, and the other a scholarship of research: evaluating new semantic appropriations of the built environment (place) as enabled by new technologies. His work has earned international repute in organizations such as SIGCHI, ACADIA, and ARCC. In 2007 the Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) selected him as their New Researcher of the Year for 2006-07. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Computing Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) and a Design Chair for CHI 2010, the premier conference of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)'s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI).

Format
The first half of the workshop will bring designers and programmers in teams which work together to solve short problems linking physical computing platforms, programming environments, and traditional interaction software such as Flash. Once the basic concepts of physical computing are covered, participants will work together to come up with the design of an interactive system based on the resources available at the workshop. Teams will then split once again into separate units that tackle independent aspects of the installation with the end goal of bringing these individual units into a cohesive whole. A possible outcome of the workshop (for example) could be an interactive game at the scale of a room which employs both physical sensory objects and virtual environments.

What is "thinkering"?
John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), claims the process of tinkering with physical objects is what allows us to evolve from using tools as instruments to using tools as conduits for productive inquiry. While some of this ability of ours to ‘tinker’ was lost when product design became “cognitively impenetrable,” the digital era is bringing it back…through a culture of participation that includes tinkering, building, remixing & mashing up. The ‘Thinkering Spaces’ initiative at ID, led by Dale Fahnstrom, T.J. McLeish, Heloisa Moura and Greg Prygrocki, takes this one step further: tinkering promotes more than just learning about the topic of inquiry; it promotes the development of critical thinking skills that will prepare us for more complex scenarios that may be unrelated to the current object of our tinkering. According to the Thinkering Spaces team, this process of thinking while tinkering inevitably leads to “thinkering” a semantic conjunction borrowed from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient where the term is used to “suggest collecting a thought as one tinkers with a half-completed bicycle.”

Who Should Attend
Both experienced and novice interaction designers are encouraged to attend.