Masters of Industrial Design

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For part of the summer 2010 internship I have been tasked with an interesting research topic: how does student registration really work at the University?

Department Picnic at the Waterworks

At the end of our last week of classes on May 7 our department had a gathering at the Waterworks near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was a beautiful sunny day, and we had some great snacks thanks to Monica, our department superhero. There was lots of bocce, some tight-rope walking, football and glamor shots (you just had to be there to understand.) It was great to get the chance to unwind with all the ID peeps, especially since a lot of grads and 2nd years are moving on to awesome jobs. We wish everyone the best of luck and hope you come back to visit in the fall!

Image: Rising up to the top floor of the Seattle Public Library

Between Monday 15th and Saturday 20th of March, MID Director Jonas Milder and second-year Masters student Gareth Roberts had the privilege of visiting three campuses of the Aalto University in Finland. The purpose for this visit was to connect with students and researchers investigating eye-tracking and knowledge transfer, and to explore possible avenues of collaboration between Aalto University and UArts.

Aalto University

While visiting the college campuses, Gareth was able to have local Finnish students participate in an eye tracking study exploring how eye movements are effected by the cognitive complexity of presented information, an investigation leading to the development of potential tools for providing feedback about student understanding of presented material.

Eye Tracking

While at the Aalto University, we were also invited to see what projects students there were currently investigating, including Spacial and Temporal tracking, Image Salience and Gaming. For more information, please visit the Aalto University Media Lab (http://mlab.taik.fi/) and the Department of Media Technology (http://media.tkk.fi/en/department/).

ImageThe next few weeks will be jam-packed for all MID students as we simultaneously prepare for our exhibition opening on April 30, our crits the following week, our final papers and due May 7, and continue to reach out for internships and jobs.  For the first year's it's been a fun semester, especially in our Interactivity class with Slavko Milekic.  Many students are wrapping up their programming for the interactive projects to get them ready for the opening.  The second years are preparing for thei

The annual Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies conference will be held in conjunction with the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies conference in Seattle, Washington on April 22-24th. I will be presenting a paper on design and politics in contemporary Sweden on the panel: Swedish Public Art and Design: Vapenhus to IKEA. I will be blogging about the panel and the reception of my paper from the conference late next week. Below is the abstract for the paper.

This Thursday, Jonny Goldstein, founder of envizualize will be coming to the MID studio to chat with us about using his techniques and methods to act as visionaries for our upcoming meeting with The Finance department, and the Faculty Council. Jonny sees visionaries as having two basic tasks: seeing a clear picture and sharing that picture with others.

We’ll keep you posted with an update after the meeting.