mauro pinheiro

New article + presentation online

I’ve just finished the online version of the paper I’ve presented at the 4th Information Design International Conference.

The article is about Ambient Information Systems, a specific type of information systems. It is part of the research I’ve been doing during my PhD. You can read and/or download it here.

I also uploaded the presentation to my Slideshare account. Take a look:

See other presentations of mine at Slideshare.

4th Information Design International Conference

This week I went to the 4th Information Design International Conference, here in Rio de Janeiro. It was much better than I expected, and I have to say that I was very excited with the presentations I saw, and very pleased to meet many interesting people.

The conference really made me think about our professional field, about how it’s evolving, how we’re growing and improving our view of what is Design, what are the chalenges of designing in such a rich information-driven society. And I mean not only design practice, but also design thinking, design research and teaching design. Although the conference was about Information Design, many of the presentations dealt with broad aspects of Design. It’s really hard to define boudaries for some design activities. When it comes to designing information systems, what are the limits to say where information design ends, and where HCI begins, or ergonomics, or communication, or graphic design, or typography? After all, aren’t they just different approaches, different steps, different elements of the same communication problem? Aren’t we all trying to improve communication with our skills?

I was glad to see the broad scope of issues that designers (and non-designers) are dealing with to improve communication. From poetry, typography, to graphic language, pictograms, to sound and other medium, many colleagues are really opening different fields for research, and building a more complex language that we could use as tools for helping people to communicate.

I saw great presentations, had inspiring moments, and I’m a little bit excited and willing to go back to my teaching activities, to try some different approaches, to start new researches with my students. There is much to do, but right now I have to stay focused on my thesis.

And I finally met Omar Tzec (Tzek), my mexican friend. After so many online exchanges, it was really a pleasure to meet him and have a chance to talk about so many things, including the silly ones. As I suspected, he is a great guy, and presented a very interesting project he made during his Masters. I really have to read his article more carefully, specially considering that he also dealt with Calm Technology, a topic that is central in my thesis.

I also had the fortune to meet Isabel Meirelles again, someone I met at the Information Design Conference in 2005, in São Paulo, and whose presentation at that time really made me think and inspired some of the work I’ve done afterwards as a teacher. And this year, again, she made a very inspiring presentation, but this time we had a chance to get to know each other, to talk about our work, and I realized what a nice person she is, and that we have many common interests – which made me really happy. I hope we’ll manage to keep in touch and to exchange some ideas.

These conferences reminds me of my undergraduate time, when I usually went to student’s gatherings, in many different places in our country. Some of the friends I’ve made at that time are still great friends, although it’s hard to keep in touch. But I still have great care for many of them, and it’s always a great joy to meet them. In the same way, I hope to see some of the friends and colleagues I met during this conference, in the years to come.

Augmented Reality for shopping

An interesting application for augmented reality. This is not exactly my research field, but is interesting to see that is becoming more popular. But somehow it seems to me that is one of those cases of “a solution looking for a problem”.

Anyway, it is a fine example of an application for this technology, although I think this could never be compared to the experience of putting the clothes on, specially for women, who usually are more “picky” with this stuff. When it comes to trying an outfit, there is much more information than the visual experience simulated here.

But, again, this is an interesting example of what can be done using augmented reality.

Interview: Diseño de interacción desde Brasil

I recently was interviewed by Omar Sosa Tzec (Tzek). He is an interaction/information designer in Mexico, and we met some time ago over the Internet.

He published the interview on his website, translated to Spanish. It’s been a while since I answered his questions, and I totally forgot about it. I really liked the interview, as I saw it again now. Tzek is a very interesting designer/professor, and I think we have much in common, being in similar positions in Brasil and Mexico.

So there it is: Mauro Pinheiro: diseño de interacción desde Brasil.

¡Gracias Tzek! :-)

Mobility and pervasive computing – second round

Here is my second class about pervasive computing, for the course on Interaction Design of Instituto Faber-Ludens.

You can see more presentations of mine at Slideshare.

Using RFID tags to control iTunes and Adium

I’ve recently discovered the Touchatag system. Fred let me borrow his kit, and I’ve spent the last day trying it.

On this experiment, I’ve used my CDs to open specific playlists on the iTunes, and using a Rubik’s cube, I’ve controlled the play/pause, next/previous track commands on iTunes – each one of the cube’s face triggered a different command. Also, using a Mike Wazowski’s toy with an RFID tag attached to his feet, I’ve managed to open Adium (an instant messenger application for Mac), and with the same tag I could change my status between ‘available’ and ‘away’.

What I managed to do so far is not so complex, but gives us a taste of what could be an alternative way to interact with computers, using ordinary objects to trigger actions on the digital environment. One interesting thing about it is that we can create our own interfaces, using the objects that most seem “right” for us. No need to follow the logic and rules of others, we can decide what seems most logical to trigger an specific action.

Course on Pervasive Computing

Last month I went to Curitiba. I was invited to talk about Pervasive Computing for the students of the course on Interaction Design of Instituto Faber-Ludens.

Here is the presentation I’ve made for this class.

You can also see some of the ideas the students came up with during the class, about using RFID tags.

See other presentations of mine on Slideshare.