Monday the 9th of February

We started the day with a visit to Alex Olwal for a short lecture and to see his work. I must say that the whole visit felt truly inspiring. The prototypes, concepts and products that he presented (both his own and others) were amazing. I especially liked the projection screen made out of compressed vaporized water. The projection screen was created by a machine that compressed and pushed out vaporized water through a narrow opening at the bottom. The result was a waterfall-looking projection screen.

After lunch we had a guest lecture by Zary Segal from Maryland University. He also spoke about his work, something he called the W (double you), and then gave us some creative assignments. The W is some kind of alter ego on the web, beyond the avatar. It is more a realistic representation of yourself on the web. Zary told us that one of their first approaches with the W was for fashion. The vision was to make it possible to try out clothes on the Internet, that is you let you W try out clothes and you will see if a sweater fits you or not on your screen. I have to say that I don’t believe in this. I tried one of those realistic “trying on dolls“, although much simpler than Zary’s W, and it did not work at all. The doll had generalized the human body to three different shapes and had some parameters for height, weight and skin color. I never came close to a realistic representation of me. I think the shape and looks of every individuals body is too complex to try to generalize in such a way, which you have to do even if you spend a year trying to make a realistic representation of yourself. Even less I think people have the ability to make that representation on their own using a web application. But people are actually using it so I guess “The Fashion W” works pretty good anyways.

At the end of the lecture each group were given an emotion. The assignment was then to explain this emotion in different ways. First just with words, then with an object. Then we were given a location and we would pick out situation at this location that produces this emotion. Eventually we had to come up with a product that supports the emotion in that situation. Excitement was our emotion and the location was the airport. The situation we chose was when you’re at the airport to pick up your girlfriend and waiting for her in the terminal. The support in that situation is to get even more excited, make the feeling stronger. So the product we came up with is called “The Love Cube”. It simply has a glowing light in it and the closer your girlfriend gets the stronger the light glows.
It was a very good and funny assignment that forced you to be creative. I loved it and the result was great!