Kickoff

A few weeks back a group of 120 students, including me, got the task to create a haptic/natural interface. Graphic Design Museum Breda (located in The Netherlands) gave a briefing with their desires: Kids between 8 and 12 should be able to use it, and do that as natural as possible. Also given was the subject: It should tell the user something about graphic design.

The project started and all students were divided into groups of 5 persons, which we chose ourselves. The last 3-4 weeks and the next month I will be working with Tobias, Cor (also referred as The Geek), Bart and Toine. During the first week we researched and analysed our target group. Both field research and desk research.

Eventually we decided on the simplest concept we could possibly imagine: the basics of graphic design. Which is of course: transferring a message from one to another via graphics. This means the whole proces is: message -> encoding -> decoding (I will add sketches later on).

A pure form to this is the enigma machine used in World War II. Simple messages got scrambled and unscrambled. And what's a more simple and playful form than sliding a 8 or 15 puzzle?

However there still isn't much MT purpose to this setup. So now what? The fun part is that children create the puzzle. Once they solved the puzzle the kid can and hopefully will create the image/design/graphic/etc for the next passenger. Once they're done the pieces will be scrambled by the computer.

For now this is the basic concept we will be applying. More updates will follow in the next few days. Thank you for reading.

- Maarten