Smart Interactions Design

WHO WE ARE

In the Smart Interactions Design lab, the design and research expertise of industrial designers, media designers and design researchers get together to work in multidisciplinary teams with professionals from other disciplines, including engineers and clinicians, to solve real world problems. The designs our lab produces span from physical medical devices that control and/or communicate with apps and games, to experimental interactive lighting or art installations that involve a physical and/or a digital component.

Our design process involves robust research components. In most of our projects, we work with a culture and context design researcher giving us an in-depth description of the human experience relevant to our projects. We often use ethnographic tools including cultural probes, interviews and questionnaires to gather relevant information from our potential users. This information is used to write briefs for the media and industrial designers who in turn develop and test many concepts in collaboration with professionals in the field and users, often in a participatory design approach. The results from the testing sessions inform the next generation of prototypes that we iteratively test and refine over and over until we have a final design.