Squeeze, rock and roll: Can tangible interaction with affective products produce stress reduction

ABSTRACT Affective computing focuses on the interpretation of users emotions via physiological and behavioral inputs. Irrelevant gestures with a pen were found to increase when users were given a mentally demanding task. Accordingly, an embedded tangible interface was developed which afforded and measured a rolling behavior, and guided the user towards reaching a balanced state of movement. During informal evaluations users acknowledged how the device could contribute to stress reduction. Conclusion, tangible interfaces appear to offer a non-obtrusive means towards interpreting and reducing stress in the office work context

ID'10

ID'10 shows the work of the Master's graduates plus a selection of Bachelor's and Master's projects from Industrial Design at the TU/e. Industrial Design focuses on designing intelligent systems, products and services. Experience at ID'10 what our society could be like in the (near) future. The designs are based on new technologies, societal trends, user studies, business aspects and new forms of interaction design. Our close relationship with industry ensures that this design vision can become a reality. ID'10 gives you the opportunity to experience this new reality now, through interactive prototypes

Explorascope: Stimulation of language and communicative skills of multiple-handicapped children through an interactive, adaptive educational toy

Very young non- or hardly speaking children with severe disabilities need active guidance to stimulate interaction with their environment in order to develop their communicative and linguistic skills. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems can help this process, provided that they are tuned to this specific user group. LinguaBytes is a research programme, which aims at developing an interactive and adaptive educational toy that stimulates the language and communicative skills of multiplehandicapped children with a developmental age of 1 – 4 years. In this article we show which guidelines we consider essential for developing this tool. We have developed several concepts based on these guidelines, of which we elucidate Explorascope (E-scope). E-scope consists of a tangible toy-like interface that is adaptable to an individual child with respect to his or her cognitive, linguistic, emotional and perceptual-motor skills. A first user test shows that E-scope is promising and useful for this user group.Industrial DesignIndustrial Design Engineerin

Move to be moved

Movement-based design is reaching critical mass in HCI, and we can start to identify strategies, similarities and differences in how it is approached. Similarities may include, for example, a strong first person perspective on design, emphasising movement, somatics and aesthetic sensibilities of the designer, as well as starting from the premise that our bodily ways of being in the world are shaped by the ecologies of people, cultural practices and the artefacts we create and use. Different classes of systems are starting to emerge, such as spurring somaesthetic appreciation processes using biofeedback loops or carefully nudging us to interact with our own movements; engaging us in affective loops where the technology takes on a stronger agency, attempting to pull participants into particular experiences; extending on our senses and perception -- even creating new senses through technology; social interactions, engaging us to jointly explore movement or touch; even endowing machines with their own somatics , exploring our relationship to technology; as well as engaging in larger political issues around the body, such as gender perspectives, or challenging the mind-body divide