zhangyangchen

Thesis Journey Starts

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:31:15 +0000

In the fall of 2011, I was traveling from Tibet to India since I was interesting in Buddhism at that moment. During the trip, I had some chances to visit and talk with some followers of the Buddha. By chatting with them, a basic Buddhist philosophy caught my interest. They believe a philosophy that the soul or spirit, after the death of the body, return to live in a new creature body, which could be a new human body or an animal depends on your sins in present life. There are several precepts that all followers of the Buddha must observe if they hope to be reborn as a human being. Although there is no any clue to approve the reincarnation exits or not, the ethics influence their daily life. By visiting of a Tibetan temple, a lama told me that he was so peaceful and happy right now. But when he was living in city, he had unrest, worry and anxiety.

From that moment, I started to think how to bring his experience and feeling to regular people without being a real Buddhist. Although soul or sprit is a certain spiritual concept that is hard to describe and visualize, there are some connections between the soul and memory that is the core of being a unique one in seven billion people. Today, new technologies make our memories can be easily recorded and stored on servers, which are becoming more accessible and visible than the past. They can help us to look back on our past in new ways, but what are the reasons we will want to do this and what kinds of memory are we might support?

In the coming months, I am exploring the possibilities of an innovative service/device that would allow people to communicate with the past and future. By collecting stories from the past I hope to bring a new perspective on how people view and live their lives and interact with their communities in the digital age.

More information can be reached from here.

Local E-Marketplace

admin — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 22:18:22 +0000

local e-marketplace is an innovative new way to shop that empowers and rewards consumers for shopping and buying local.
I made this introduction video this summer. There is a trailer from a four minute animated video depicting the new strategy. The beginning of this video presents consumers’ current frustrations with the local shopping experience.
The full animation will be released soon on client’s (Yell) conference and website.

The storyboard:

Loxal

admin — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 05:53:56 +0000

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)

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:22:17 +0000

Date: Dec 2010, 9 weeks
Collaborator: Electrolux design lab.
Abstract: Kool(K), is a Controller-Free Kitchen Environment by using two 3D depth cameras and sensors. It has the possibility to analyze 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, and organize and plan their cooking time of multi-dishes.

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.
On the wide scope of this project, I started to investigate various phenomenon, cultures and cooking methods in the kitchen. Besides, I am also interested in finding out what will happen when kitchen applications become connected. Based on some interviews include an extreme user who is a Swedish chef and observing people’s daily culinary process, a conflicting situation captured my attention. Why most people like cooking but they usually have fast food or frozen food instead?

In order to understand people’s cooking habit, I did a survey to find out a few things I think would be very interesting to look at, namely how we manifest a food style, and how it may evolve. If you would like to know more about the survay, please download the result of the Survey from here: Cuisine thoughts
After collocating and analyzing these information, I listed some key points below from the survey.
1. Exoticism inspires their cooking.
2. People like cooking and sharing food with friends.
3. Recipe is a popular way to learn cooking, but it has its limited.

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.

After brainstorming section, I sketched out a scenario below to explicate my initial idea that people can create and share “recipes” easily.

How to Detect the user’s behavior?
I played with 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.
Considering the situation of cooking, for example, a wet hand, a gesture interface was designed in this case instead of touchscreen or something else. In this system, kinect helps to track people’s gesture and recognize the commands.

Here is a video to define gestures that have been used for communicating with the system.

Which kind of recipe to share?
Considering the limit of traditional recipe, I designed a dynamic recipe that can be updated based on user’s current activities. The dynamic recipe is generated followed a timeline by the system via receiving values from different sensors in the kitchen. Thus the benefit of it is that users have an overview of the whole cooking process and aware of when and what should do.

I started with wireframes to design the GUI. I would like to keep the interface simple and efficient. The purpose of it is to afford necessary information for supporting cooking.

Result:
Kool(K) is shown to Electrolux by projecting the UI animation on the worktop to simulate the scene in the near future. Please watch the proposal video at the top of this page.

X-ray Box

admin — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:24:51 +0000

I thought it would be good to share some work I have been doing last month. We had a 5 weeks prototyping experience course which brought a lot of fun to us. Here is one interesting result I made at the end of the second week. I named this prototyping X-ray Box and you can find the documentation at the end of this post to explain how I made it.

Cat, Pad and Food

admin — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 22:53:33 +0000

Date: Nov 2010, 1 week
Team: Erik Rydell, Maria Niva and Yangchen Zhang
Role: Arduino programmer, Animator
Abstract: It is a prototyping of a remote controlled device that helps cat owners to feed their cats by shaking and tipping iPad

This is a workshop called Mobile Hacking, which was a one-week school course. We were given the brief in which we were asked to: ”…explore telepresent, nonverbal, communication between a mobile device and a household applicaces. You should imagine that you are away from home and want to communicate with a pet left in the house.” Our tutors were Matt Cottam and Brian Hinch.
We worked as a team designed an application in which a light sensor allowed you to see if your cat’s food is running out on your iPad. Then by shaking the iPad you could shake a box of food back at home to call your cat, and by tilting the screen with the same gesture as pouring cat food from a box, you could refill the bowl. Meanwhile, a proximity sensor allowed you to see if your cat is closing or not.

Despite the model clearly being a sketch made of wood and hardware store parts, it was wireless and it worked. Here is a video documentation about the process of this project.
As a result, we wrote a paper and presented it on SIDeR 2012 conference.

Fallen Stop motion

admin — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 17:42:55 +0000

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.

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

Here is few images from this workshop.

Ixd Jingle

admin — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 23:12:48 +0000

During the break of prototyping experience, we were be asked to design a jingle for our programme.
I got some inspiration from Julien Vallee ‘s work.
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.

Limited by time, Erik and I made the initial version of the interaction design jingle can be found here.