littleBits’ Droid Inventor Kit + Coding
Company littleBits
Introduction Date April 8, 2018
Project Website https://shop.littlebits.com/products/droid-inventor-kit
Why is this project worthy of an award?
littleBits introduced coding to its award-winning Droid Inventor Kit for the first time, providing kids with more invention experiences. Made possible by an easy-to-use drag and drop coding canvas built off of Scratch Blocks, the block-based programming was developed through a collaboration between Google and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lifelong Kindergarten group. With invention at its core, the Droid Inventor Kit fosters STEAM, creativity, and problem-solving skills. It comes with everything kids need to create and customize their Droid™ straight out of the box, including step-by-step in-app instructions that allow kids to create their Droid, control it in Drive Mode, Force™ Mode, and more. These experiences will build upon existing Droid missions to expand kids’ inventing skills and play experiences. Additional features include: - Six new in-app challenges encourage kids to reconfigure the littleBits technology in unique ways - Each littleBits color-coded electronic block has a different function -- such as a power, motor, or sensor -- enabling kids to use their Droid in new and exciting ways - Included stickers and in-app missions encourage kids to customize their Droid using crafts or household objects, giving their Droid its own special personality - A free app (iOS and Android) completes the experience, providing step-by-step instructions and how-to videos
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
littleBits collaborated with Lucasfilm to launch the award-winning Droid Inventor Kit, which is comprised of electronic blocks that empower kids to create their own Droid and bring it to life. While the audience for Star Wars toys is typically comprised of only ten percent girls, the Droid Inventor Kit was the first toy to engage more than four times that number. The littleBits Droid Inventor Kit is not a replica toy. It’s meant to mimic the science, technology, and invention ethos of the Star Wars franchise in a hands-on product for current and future fans -- encouraging both girls and boys to create inventions that promote STEM through iterative learning. We did this through gender neutral design principles -- making sure that our product appeals to both girls and boys. This is more important than ever in a time when, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs in STEM currently make up 6.2 percent of all U.S. employment. Not only that, but the majority of STEM-related occupations boast wages above the national average and demonstrate above-average growth. To be competitive in the future of work, kids need to have the foundational skills necessary to succeed -- especially women. You’ve probably read the stats. Women are graduating college at greater numbers than ever before. Since 2014, more women than men earn college degrees each year; and while they are increasingly finding a place in tech companies, they are still not fulfilling their share of technical roles. Part of the reason for this is that too many companies are trying to tackle the so-called “pipeline problem” in the wrong places -- at work, in the media, via strategic investments -- but where they really need to be tackling it is in the eighth grade. The National Girls Collaborative Project reports that girls score almost identically to their male classmates on standardized tests through high school. Yet, boys demonstrate twice as much interest in STEM careers as girls as early as the eighth grade. Men then go on to hold a disproportionately high share of STEM undergraduate degrees, particularly in engineering. And today, 84 percent of working professionals in science or engineering jobs in the U.S are white or Asian males. Women have the acumen, but for one reason or another, they are not sticking with STEM for the long-haul, which puts us all at a disadvantage. littleBits found that eighth grade is the tipping point; if you are still wondering how to attract women to STEM after they are thirteen years old, you’re already late to the game.
Who worked on the project?
Krystal Persaud, Senior Director, Product Design and Strategy Emily Tuteur, Senior Product Design Lead Monty Kim, Senior Product Designer
View the project video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D1IWn4dTAg
Los Angeles Stadium Premier Center
Company Advent
Introduction Date November 1, 2017
Project Website
Why is this project worthy of an award?
The Los Angeles Rams and Legends came to us with a simple request: completely reconceive the idea of a sales center — how it looks, how it feels, how it conveys information to high-dollar clients — and make sure it drives hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. The Los Angeles Stadium and Entertainment District is an unprecedented stadium venture, built for two NFL teams, and surrounded by a massive district of parks, hotels, retail, offices and residential real estate. It required an unprecedented sales center. The two main staples of stadium suite-holder sales are the stadium model and the sample suite. We decided to turn both concepts on their heads. To begin with the model, we honored the pervasive emotional attachment to physical models. Customers love them for the same reason designers, architects and children do — they provide a tangible connection between the imagination and reality. They’re touchable, they’re real … and they’re cool. We avoided the temptation of straying from physical and moving to a pure digital solution, and instead expanded the idea, creating a massive 30x40’ (1,200 square feet), solid white model of the stadium and entire surrounding campus. 12 projectors are aimed at this model, and projection mapping provides a colorful and interactive experience, allowing the sales staff to show differing kinds of gameplay on the field, the location of suites and parking, the effects of seasonal sunlight and traffic and much more. There are even shadows of planes passing overhead on their way to and from LAX. To sell luxury suites, we immediately did away with physical suite models. This seemed crazy at first, as these kind of showroom models have been as much a touchstone of the sports sales game as pinboards for as long suite sales have existed. Instead, we created a virtual suite experience, with a set of screens running 9720x2160 resolution (20,995,200 pixels) and processing more than 2.3 billion pixels per second. While guests are treated to a custom tour of a life-size virtual suite by their sales person, they can also touch physical samples of the luxury materials, keeping a tangible connection. An introductory sizzle video, conceived and written by our staff and produced by the client, greets guests in a video tunnel with 20 screens running at a higher resolution (9600x4320) than IMAX. Throughout, we were careful to focus on clean, design and features that would make the sales staff’s work easy and navigable. Individual information kiosks, a private conference room and rooftop garden closing areas provide ample opportunity for conversation and the unreplaceable human touch.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
We began the design process with a series of discovery interviews with Los Angeles Rams and Legends administration, coaching staff and players, as well as with Rams superfans. Then, we invited Rams and Legends staff (the Chargers move was not yet finalized) to our offices for a two-day charette. The results of the charette, including an enormous mind map created by our VP of Design, were vital touchstones for both us and the clients throughout the process. It’s important to note that there is no permanent Rams-specific or Chargers-specific branding within the space. We were careful to keep our colors bold but neutral to teams, opting for rich blue and bright white that could suggest team affinity when team helmets and other paraphernalia were used by sales staff. Also, we’re always proud to add that one of our interns, Calvin Mai, designed the sweeping, curved reception desk, which has become an iconic spot in the center. We like to think it speaks to our taste in interns.
Who worked on the project?
Design Director: Drew Bryant Design Lead: Nathan Morgan Designer: Dustin Waltke Digital Experience: John Downie
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/kgvstudios/review/256492677/879d5e1d15
LumiWatch: On-Arm Projected Touch Interfaces
Company Carnegie Mellon University and ASU Tech
Introduction Date April 22, 2018
Project Website https://robertxiao.ca/research/lumiwatch
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Despite smartwatches being nearly as computationally capable as smartphones, we do not use them in powerful ways. This is because their small size significantly constrains the user interface. What is needed is a way to have large smartwatch interactions without making the smartwatch physically larger. Projecting interfaces onto a wearers skin has the potential to provide a large surface area for interaction, while the electronics can remain small. Such worn projected interfaces have been a long-standing fixture of science fiction, but the technology has not been possible. We present LumiWatch, the first fully functional and self-contained projection smartwatch capable of projecting a usable touchscreen onto a wearer’s arm. LumiWatch takes advantage of the large surface area of a user’s arm in order to provide comfortable and familiar touchscreen interactions, while maintaining the compact form factor of the smartwatch body. It provides roughly 40 square centimetres of interactive area on the user’s arm – five times that of a typical smartwatch’s display. Wearing LumiWatch is like wearing any other smartwatch – it is lightweight and sits comfortably on the wrist. However, instead of having to look at a small, cramped screen, or tap and swipe across a tiny area, the interactions with the watch can happen over the large area of your arm. Imagine being able to see navigation directions quickly while driving or cycling, or to manipulate a picture shown on your arm. LumiWatch provides more interaction space – and therefore more flexibility – without trading away the immediacy or mobility of watches. Prior to LumiWatch, it was widely doubted that a practical projection system would have the necessary luminance, contrast and physical size to project usable interfaces onto human arms, and we view the technological innovations in LumiWatch as being critical to demonstrating the feasibility of this approach. It is our hope that an Innovation By Design award will help to spur more interest in the area of projected wearable technologies, in order to push these kinds of technologies ever closer to commercial reality. LumiWatch was developed by a team from Carnegie Mellon University and ASU Tech of Beijing, led by CMU Ph.D. student Robert Xiao, over roughly a 2-year period. It was first made public at the ACM SIGCHI conference (the most prestigious general venue in the field of Human-Computer Interaction) held in Montreal during April of 2018.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
LumiWatch incorporates a number of technical innovations to enable large interactions from a tiny package. Our touch sensing module consists of an array of very tiny infrared distance sensors, coupled with clever touch-tracking software that is able to turn skin into a touch sensitive surface. We pair it with our custom-designed micro-projection module, which has a total volume of just 2 cubic centimetres and a brightness of 15 lumens. This module uses a tiny (MEMS) mirror combined with eye-safe lasers to project interactive media onto the arm, minimizing wasted energy and providing focus-free projection. To our knowledge, this is the smallest projection implementation that offers full color and high resolution graphics. To assure accurate and readable projected content, LumiWatch employs several layers of projection adjustment, including calibration to the irregular geometry of the arm and dynamic calibration to account for the way the watch is worn. A simple swipe-to-unlock gesture is used to simultaneously verify the user’s intent to interact with the system, and to provide calibration data for projection fidelity. We have also worked to ensure that the projections are bright enough to be visible both indoors and outdoors, on hairy and hairless arms, and across a range of different skin colors. It is crucial that our device be accessible to as many people as possible, and so we made it our goal to explicitly study the fidelity of the projection under these various conditions. Our prototype integrates a projection module, touch sensor, computational capabilities and a battery good for one hour of continuous projection into a compact package that can be comfortably worn on the wrist. Past on-arm projection systems have been large, bulky, and decidedly not wearable, requiring large projection arm-worn modules with external computer systems; LumiWatch is the first system to demonstrate that these capabilities can be achieved in a small, wearable form factor, and we stress that this is key to demonstrating the feasibility of the projected wearable approach in the near future. Please see our peer-reviewed paper for more technical details, and also the overview video.
Who worked on the project?
Robert Xiao, Teng Cao, Ning Guo, Jun Zhuo, Yang Zhang and Chris Harrison
View the project video: https://youtu.be/VJNMrulWJ3k
Luna Display
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Luna Display is the only hardware solution that turns any iPad into a true, wireless second display. Luna seamlessly extends your Mac desktop, so that you can have the freedom to take your work anywhere. Luna Display sets up in seconds and instantly works over your existing Wifi network. Simply plug Luna into any Mac’s USB-C or DisplayPort and install the Luna app. Using the iPad as a second display allows you to more easily get your work done from anywhere — so you can be productive whether you’re at the office, in the studio, or on the go. With full Apple compatibility, Luna supports external keyboards, Apple Pencil, and touch interactions. It literally turns your Mac into a touchable device, allowing pinching, panning and tapping — making it much more than just a second screen. We developed Luna because we knew there was a better solution than relying on software to turn an iPad into a second display. Software apps hack your graphics card, delivering a glitchy and unreliable picture. Software tricks your Mac into thinking a display is attached, when in fact they get no benefit of graphics acceleration or Metal GPU support. It's like buying a car and only using half the engine. So unlike software apps, Luna harnesses the raw power of your graphics card, giving you the full benefit of its graphics acceleration — delivering a stunning second monitor that’s 100% wire free. Luna runs on our proprietary LIQUID Technology, which guarantees crystal clear image quality, reliable performance, and wireless flexibility. Before Luna, we designed and developed Astropad — the award-winning design app used by major animation studios and product design firms across the globe (astropad.com). Luna carries the same quality and performance that has already been delivered to our tens of thousands of Astropad customers. We believe that people should be able to work anywhere without compromising the quality of their work — and Luna brings the freedom to do just that.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
In designing Luna Display, we challenged ourselves to come up with an innovative solution to make seamless user interactions. Instead of squeezing UI in where it didn’t fit, we built a new button to conceal it: it’s called the Camera Button. Luna Display creates a unique UI overlap. First, there’s the Mac UI showing up on your iPad, coming from whatever Mac program you’re using (such as Photoshop or a web browser). On top of that, there’s the native iPad UI. So if we wanted to add our own Luna Display UI, where would we put it without creating a tangle of conflicting UI? Hiding UI behind a gesture wasn’t an option — every edge of the iPad is already occupied with an existing gesture: swipe up for your dock, left to search, and down for notifications. We really needed something novel to work with. Our Astro HQ cofounder Giovanni Donelli said that the idea to turn the camera into a button came like lightning: “I had been staring at a white bezel iPad for so long, and I kept wishing there was another home button we could use. My eyes kept falling on the camera, and I really wanted to touch it!” But turning the camera into a reliably functioning button didn’t come without some challenges. Variable Lighting: The Camera Button works by detecting the amount of light coming in through the camera. Covering up the camera with your finger blocks all light, triggering a response from the iPad. The tricky part was getting it to work in all lighting conditions, across all iPad cameras. To test how the camera behaves in different lighting conditions, we built a makeshift light box. By manipulating the lighting, we were able to engineer the camera button to work predictably despite the brightness of the room. We even tested variances in finger pressure — how hard or lightly you tap the camera. Energy Efficiency: In order for the Camera Button to work, the camera needs to be constantly processing while using the app. So we made it a design goal from the beginning to ensure that it doesn’t affect battery life. This meant writing very efficient code based on algorithms that prioritized energy efficiency. Today, the Camera Button requires less than 1% CPU to run. User Privacy: Maintaining user privacy is critical, and that meant finding ways to anonymize data coming in from the camera. The solution: blur the camera images to the point of not being able to see any data coming in, so the only thing the camera registers is the amount of light coming in. Additionally, data coming in through the camera never leaves the iPad. In total, we spent about six months building and testing the Camera Button. The result: a sleek and functional new interaction for Luna Display that doesn’t interrupt your workflow. (You can see photos of our engineering process here: https://bit.ly/2hJpBMB).
Who worked on the project?
Matt Ronge, Cofounder & CEO Giovanni Donelli, Cofounder & Head of Product Savannah Reising, Marketing Manager Malyse McKinnon, Head of Artist Relations Habib Moukalled, Senior Software Engineer Adam Mika, Senior Software Engineer Jake Swensen, Firmware Engineer
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/230350416
M1 Timepiece
Why is this project worthy of an award?
The M1 is a new watch collection by Zach Raven of RVNDSGN. Designed completely in house, the M1 delivers a brand new contemporary aesthetic and function while utilizing high end materials. Throughout the design process, we wanted to develop a completely unique timepiece without having to design our own in-house movement. In-house movements can take years and millions of dollars to develop, so our strategy was to use a robust, popular, Swiss automatic movement, and design our language around that. We decided on the Sellita SW200-1, a Swiss automatic mechanical movement. After that research and decision, the design was built around that movement. While most design conscious watches fall into the fashion market, we recognized a hole in the upper end of the market that targets design savvy customers. With that in mind, the M1 uses sapphire crystal, automatic Swiss movements, genuine leather, and stainless steel, and delivers a much higher end construction than the typical quartz watch. The M1 eschews hands in favor of dual-layered discs to display time. By positioning the discs directly under the edge-to-edge crystal, we use the optics inherent in sapphire to create the illusion the time is displayed right on the surface of the crystal. In a world of phones and smart watches, a watch is worn more for fashion than utility. With that in mind, we decided to pare down our dial to 15-minute increments reminiscent of the response a person receives when asking the time; such as "It's quarter to 2" or “Half past 5”. It’s a calmer representation of time in our hectic world. The M1 is the work of over a year of research, design, refinement, and development. We have partnered with Swiss manufacturers and suppliers to engineer a unique Swiss-Made timepiece. Operation is similar to any automatic watch. The movement never needs a battery, and winds itself as the user wears the watch. Time and date can be set with a flush mount crown.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
We have taken on the task to provide our users with a completely new experience unlike any timepiece at any price while using time tested Swiss components. As mentioned, when developing a custom movement creative freedom is limitless, and a retail price usually is as well. Our main goal was to provide something unique while maintaining an "in-reach" price. We feel we have accomplished that in our innovative way of telling time.
Who worked on the project?
Zach Raven - Owner/Chief Creative Officer
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/262832650
