Industrial design equates to everything we touch from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep.  It literally shape our daily experiences. 

This presentation by Deana McDonagh briefly introduces industrial design and its importance for our daily life. 

Deana McDonagh talks about the importance of empathy when designing for people that are different from you and about the so called Empathic Horizon.

A presentation is also available on iFoundry’s SlideShare channel. 

The Technology Entrepreneur Center will hold an awards ceremony for the  $30,000 Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize for Outstanding Innovation 3 pm, 4 March 2009 (Wednesday)  at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NCSA, with a reception to follow.

The material landscape is everything that we surround ourselves with, from the products that we purchase and place in our home to the products that are purchased for us that we have to work with. This video talks about how the material landscape connects with our personality and how functionality and super-functionality influence industrial design.

Traditional product design cycle places user input on late stages of product development. User centered design places user input earlier on the design cycle. However, to really fulfill the needs of the consumer, the user input has to be placed in the very beginning of the development, right in the design brief stage.  This is one of the principles of the Empathic Design Approach.

This extended abstract (here) critically examines the use of the terms “rigorous” and “soft” in the context of engineering modeling. Common engineering usage of the terms is contrasted with Toulmin’s notion of “reasonableness” and Schoen’s notion of “reflective practice.” The abstract continues by considering an economic model of models in engineering, suggesting that overly “rigorous” engineering practice may box itself into being unable to afford the models it values, thereby presenting a conundrum for the practice and teaching engineering that demands relaxation.

The Center for Global Studies presents a talk by Michael Furdyk, Co-Founder of TakingIT Global: “How Digital Kids are Changing the World” on March 06 2009, 12:00 pm. A brief description of the talk: Technology has created new expectations driving the learning characteristics of todays students. Michael Furdyk, Co-founder and Director of Technology for TakingITGlobal.org, a global online community for young people, engaging hundreds of thousands of youth in over 200 countries discusses youth engagement and the Net Generation.

One of the benefits of attending the Summit on the Engineer of the Future at Olin College on 31 March – 1 April 2009 (Tuesday evening – Wednesday) is to be present for signing the the Transformation Proclamation that will bring the Alliance for Promoting Innovation in Engineering Education to life.  Read more here.

If museums should think about this, so should universities.

Hector Postigo, Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications & Mass Media, Temple University, will present, as part of the CAS Initiative Lecture Series, Game On! Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the XBox.  The lecture will be presented on Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 4:00 PM, Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory Street, Urbana.  Video games, be they PC games or games for dedicated consoles like the Xbox or the Wii, are now relatively ubiquitous among American households and have quickly become more than just another entertainment medium.   Professor Postigo discusses characteristics of video game culture, focusing on user-generated content such as machinima, fan modifications, and co-creative production.  Reflections on these characteristics suggest a new era of consumer participation in content production that necessitates a refashioning of our understanding of ownership in commercial media content.

All CAS events are free and open to the public.