IDEO Labs

With the passing of IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge, we have been reflecting on the ways he has influenced our lives and made the world a better place.  Bill has had an enormous impact on the field of interaction design and professed the importance of making interactions delightful.

For IDEO Labs, we wanted to do a tribute to him in a very IDEO Labs kind of way.  Perhaps one of the most iconic objects Bill designed was the GRiD Compass, the world’s first laptop computer.  Bill’s design was the original clamshell design that all current laptops have descended from.  We wondered if we could use a GRiD as a way to collect stories about Bill from around the office. (more…)

When the iPhone 4S launched in October of last year, it shipped with a feature that has yet to be fully utilized. That feature, Bluetooth 4.0 (also known as Bluetooth Low-Energy) is also in several new Apple products including the iPad 3 and MacBook Air. It is not unlike previous versions of Bluetooth, but it has some notable advantages that make it ideal for certain applications: (more…)

Mixing makers, hackers, designers, and OpenIDEOers in IDEO’s London studio

Way back in December, some of us in the IDEO London studio started talking in a pub about some of the ideas arising out of OpenIDEO and its challenges for social good.

We wondered: How could we help the digital community build out more of these winning tech and design solutions? What would happen if we got passionate designers, hackers, and digital community members in a room with no distractions one weekend, all working towards creating physical & digital prototypes for social good? And, could we all play around with Arduino and the 3-D printer while we were at it?

Originally we thought of doing a hackathon. Then we decided to push the concept to its next iteration. How could we bring together multidisciplinary weekend project teams—not just software engineers and digital designers, but also industrial designers, architects, and problem solvers from different backgrounds? Could we create a new kind of design-driven collaborative event? Inspired by IDEO’s own maker culture, the DIY community at Maker Faire, and Silicon Valley hackathons, we decided to experiment with the concept. We called this prototype event a “Make-a-thon.”

The result was a unique London pop-up event that produced some truly original concepts and meaningful digital and physical prototypes. We hosted about 60 makers and hackers in the IDEO London studio—including 1/3 IDEOers and 2/3 UK creative community members. We used EventBrite to keep track of invitations and had a waiting list of about 65 people. Here’s what we made in a 1.5 days—and what we learned.

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The Interaction Design and Digital community in the Bay Area has been regularly getting together after hours to inspire and learn from each other. It’s a time to play, build and be inspired. But most of all, it’s a time to have fun with friends.

Our own Amid Moradganjeh filmed and assembled a video which captures and  communicates the mood of one of our Hack Nights really well. As some of these projects evolve, we look forward to sharing them with you!

A couple of weeks ago I happened to get an email from a professor at Shizuoka University named Yoichi Nagashima. Five of his students formed “Revolution-J” where they have created five prepared Jaminators hacked with Arduinos, connected to Max/MSP patches.

Their detailed build log is in Japanese, but you can still get a basic idea of what they have done. Better yet they published all of their schematics and code.

I figured I should re-blog this because not only is it a cool open source project, but the Jaminator was an IDEO designed toy guitar / drum set from 1992. I’d say it basically is the full embodiment of the word “rad” as is confirmed in the press photo after the jump:

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