Since I started working in Designit, a Europe’s design consultancy, it has been a long time without any update here. Because most new works are not allowed to share recently.
This is a video I made to introduce a very cool and young company – Loxal which is founded in New York by my friends. It is about the local merchant and its loyal customers. Loxal is a web-based platform that facilitates the creation and management of loyalty programs by small and mid-size merchants.
It takes around 50 hours including amending the script and discussion with my friend. I appreciate this chance to practice my AE skills and enjoy the freelance working experience. Maybe I should try more?

Kool(K), is a Controller-Free Kitchen Environment by using two 3D depth cameras and sensors. It has the possibility to analyze all the values from different sensors of appliances and record the cooking process. Users can easily share their own timeline-based recipes which are automatically generated by Kool(K) with the world. Meanwhile, it encourages people to try and improve the recipes which are existent. Thus, it is also a Learning and Organizing System for cooking after using for a while. They can track their own cooking and food habits, collect recipes from the world, and organize and plan their cooking time of multi-dishes.

	Background As technology evolves, ubiquitous computers will also come in different sizes, each suited to a particular task in the kitchen. There is a design opportunity to design a smart system or appliance to inspire people to enjoy cooking. This is a nine weeks individual project in collaboration with Electrolux design lab.
	Question On the wide scope of this project, I investigated several kinds of phenomenon, cultures and cooking methods in the kitchen. I also am interested in finding out what will happen when kitchen applications become connected. I started with some interviews include an extreme user who is a Swedish chef and observing their daily culinary process after going through some papers. Through the interviews, I found a conflicting situation why people like cooking but they usually have fast food or frozen food. From these two doubts, I had a plan to understand them and to design something to supply creative ways to affect their cooking habits.
	Understanding I did a survey with my classmate Joachim to find out a few things we think would be very interesting to look at, namely how we manifest a food style, and how it may evolve and which influences it is subject to. If you would like to know more about it , please download the result of the Survey from here: Cuisine thoughts After collocating these information, I listed some key pints below: Exoticism inspires their cooking. People like cooking and sharing food with friends. Recipe is a popular way to learn cooking, but it has its limited.
	Ideation Based on the research, I illustrate an information map to describe the process of cooking from three elements which are people’s activities, ingredients and appliances. On this map, I pointed three design opportunities on three different steps during cooking. Here is a storyboard below to explicate my initial idea that people can create and share “recipes” easily.

	A dynamic recipe? As for the scale of the concept, there are many aspects I have to consider. I decided to focus on the dynamic recipe. Since we are familiar with social network and it is not an innovation in this system. The dynamic recipe is generated based on timeline by the system via receiving values from different sensors in the kitchen. Thus the benefit of this new recipe is that users have an overview of the whole cooking process.
	Developing In order to complete the system from technology to user experience, and integrate them into design, I played with sensors and a 3D depth camera which is Kinect in this case to make a prototyping for test. In this phase, programming is most challenging part for me. I used a processing library for hacking Kinect to track people’s activities.
	Gesture interface Considering the situation of cooking, for example, a wet hand, I designed a gesture interface instead of touchscreen or something else. Here is a short video to show which kind gestures have been used in this system.
	GUI I started with wireframes to design the UI. I would like to keep the interface simple and efficient. The purpose of it is to afford limited information to help cooking.
	Result Kool(K) is shown to Electrolux by projecting the UI animation on the worktop to simulate the scene in the near future as the photos on the left. Please watch the proposal video at the top of this page.

Documentation:

Video Effects, RFID and Wireless from Yangchen on Vimeo.

It is one week workshop, collaborated with Jenn. This workshop was led by Timo Arnall (Oslo School of Architecture & Design) and Matt Cottam.

In this week, we looked over film-making, cinematography, animation and other time-based techniques that allow us to explore ideas and story.  The aim of this workshop is to temporarily break-free from pixels, screens, digital tools and interfaces, and clever use simple objects and tools from the world, expose new ways to see, understand and communicate our work.

<fallen> is a story about a pencil which is guided by a pencil sharpener to another world.

Here is the documentation of  this workshop.

I was playing with paper and shadows, since i did not get to do that before. I would like to try how it looks in stop motion. And I also got some inspiration from Julien Vallee ‘s work.
limited by the time, Erik and I made the rough version of the interaction design jingle can be found here.

What is interaction design(IxD)? What is the different between product design and IxD?

Mike, our former programme director answered these questions in a pretty clear way.
Product design focuses on user, emphasis on “use”, so product is the mediator; IXD focuses on “person”, emphasis on “social practice”, and technology is the mediator.
That’s why interaction designers don’t make physical products mostly. Their design which is much wider than product can be a web, a method, a service, etc.

BACKGROUND

This project was done in collaboration with Sogeti, who was working with Social services department of Umeå Kommun (Municipality) to develop an IT system to support their daily work processes. The result is to deliver a final concept that shows how the collaborating department at the Umea Municipality can be assisted in making informed decisions efficiently.

We, Nirvana and I, as a team looked into the service houses within the social service department. Service houses in Umeå are where elderlies can live under daily supervision.

INITIAL RESEARCH

We visited one of them in Umeå which called Sofieborg Servicehus several times to understand their work. After five interviews with the elderly family and employees there, we got an overview of the hierarchy of Umea Municipality.

On the left there are two videos which one is clip from our interview documentations to show staffs working details in service house. Other one is the analysis on how is the current situation in terms of information sharing and what is the scope of it.

Based on interview and analysis, I made a flash chart to describe the hierarchy of service house and the information sharing in Umeå Kommun. Click each levels to look through the information details.

CONCEPT

Because the staff in retirement house are the front level to face the clients who are selectezd by hospital and selection committee, we focused more on them in our case. After ethnographic research and brainstormings, we set our goal of the project is how can we make the information sharing  between the Umeå Kommun’s different levels of management and the service house staff more efficient.

There is a graphic to show our solution for the goal. We designed four channels for all the related people in the system to reach the data base to get the information they need. It was important to make the system for each group that the information is not overload or lost.

All the tools that are included in this system are feasible and familiar to each group.

RESULT

Here is our story of the concept.

INFO

I worked with Umevatoriet which is an observatory and planetarium to design a graphic advertisement.  The  main mission of the campaign was to inspire young people’s interest in natural sciences.

The goal of this project is exploring the possibilities of using graphic form, layering and animation in interface design. These approaches attempt to explore a visual structure for interfaces that break the traditional boundaries of GUI design.

Inside the observatory there is an artificial starry sky – a planetarium that makes it possible to view events in space. Furthermore, there are more exciting experiments and actives for children in Umevatoriet.

RESEARCH & ANALYZE

After interviewing with Umevatoriat and Umea citizen, I noticed that most of people, don’t know where Umevatoriat is but they felt a lot of interest to visit it. Thus, my idea is to find a solution to make the relation between city Umea and Umevatoriat closer.

One concept is that masking the solar system on the map of Umea. The position of sun is the same location of Umevatoriat. According to the map, I selected some pots on the earth orbit which are available in the city to install the outdoor advertisements. Blue circles display the sign locations in the center of Umea.

On the basis of this analyses, I separated all information into 3 different categories based on content and behaviors how to get information in normal life.

CONCEPT GENERATION

Considering the huge cost of building a lot of tangible dome screens around the city, I offered another solution using the screen of  a mobile phone to display information.

In order to add more interaction between  a physical real-world environment and the screen-based universe, I found another interesting technology Augmented Reality which I tested on my laptop with the cam.

DESIGN PROPASAL

The concept used mobile phones to browse information of Umevatoriat.  People in proximity of the mark area can spontaneously sign in, and connect to the Starry Sky application via their Bluetooth-enabled mobile.

Based on augmented reality and location service, citizens can easily browse current information about Umevatoriat and Universe in the mark areas around Umeå,

The mark on the ground is an abstract pattern  about Umeå map to evoke curious and help people without mobile phone to reach Umevatoriat.

Here is the video to show the concept.