Author Archives: Timo

Touch as interaction medium

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating. In London, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong and elsewhere the ‘swipe’ or ‘tap’ is already a common interaction for paying and entering in a wide variety of public situations. In the near future the mobile phone and RFID card may be [...]

Posted in Design briefs, Interaction design, Research | 3 Comments

NFC access control

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating. RFID and NFC can be used to provide access to places in the same way as traditional keys or tickets. This brief emerged from a frustration with existing access control systems. For interfaces of such potential simplicity they are often [...]

Posted in Design briefs, Interaction design, Mobile | 1 Comment

A graphic language for RFID

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating. RFID is being used for an increasing number of interactions with everyday infrastructures. From travelcards, keyless entry, passports and micropayments to content downloads, smart posters and digital wallets on mobile phones. Attempts have been made to represent these interactions graphically [...]

Posted in Design briefs, Research, Visual design | 8 Comments

Touch design briefs

The Touch project has been investigating applications and services for RFID and NFC since 2005. Although RFID and NFC have been much hyped, the technologies have been relatively little explored from a design perspective. We have discovered many opportunities for original explorations, studies and design projects. At the beginning of 2007, as we started to [...]

Posted in About the project, Design briefs, Interaction design, Mobile, Research | 12 Comments

Teaching Touch

This spring we have an MA interaction design course dedicated to the Touch research project at AHO called ‘Tangible interactions’. On this course there are 10 students, mainly with an industrial and interaction design background. So far we have had workshops from Tom Igoe on networked objects and Anne Galloway on anthropology and ethnographic method. [...]

Posted in About the project, Interaction design, Student projects, Workshops | 5 Comments

Framtidens mobil / near future of mobility

Norsk Form, the centre for design, architecture and urban area planning, hosted an evening seminar on the Near future of mobility on 11 April 2007. The seminar intended to look at trends and patterns in the design of mobile devices and services. The Touch project was invited to present alongside Anne Galloway and Tapani Jokinen, [...]

Posted in Events, Mobile | Leave a comment

RFID form factors

As our interaction design students get deeper into prototyping with RFID, we needed to start looking at the range of possibilities around the materials and forms of RFID tags. Last week we created a demonstration board of all the RFID tags that we have collected over the last year. Most of these tags are available [...]

Posted in Interaction design, Product design, Research, Student projects, Technicalities | 3 Comments

Characters for mobile etiquette

Seen last year on France’s TGV trains, two icons that indicate areas where mobile phone use is allowed: Awake Asleep Some evidence that characters work well beyond the archetypical Suica Penguin…

Posted in Mobile, Research, Visual design | Leave a comment