der hess

After launching the online guide for developing medical devices, our team had the chance to rest a little bit and dealt with some minor improvements for the platform in general (see our Kanban Board, other inspirations on Agile Board Hacks).

We used and adapted the Kanban Board method for our coordination.

Beside of those minor tasks on our board, we had to explore these additional user needs for our next milestone:

• Improve user engagement through a customized and personalized online guide
• Increase the level of learning for the online guide without being too theoretical
• Improve decision making  skills of a medical product development through online tools
• Improve the quality of grant applications for medical products

After some internal meetings with our copywriters and the medical engineering team, we figured out some key features for our new service in a very abstract sketch.

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At my last blog post, I have told you that it was not possible to launch the development guide for medical devices from the beginning of our online platform medizintechnologie.de. This blog post describes the design and prototyping process of our development guide for medical device engineers.

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Some time ago, I posted a ‘making of’ series about the low-budget project wasfuttern.de. This time I will blog about the development process of the current bigger (3-5 years) web project in the field of medical engineering in Germany. My writings intend to give Interaction Designer and User Experience specialist an insight view what I have learnt from this project.

Background

When I started end of 2012, the publication Website: Nationaler Strategieprozess "Innovationen in der Medizintechnik" appeared and stated Germany needs more informational transparency about the medical engineering industry. The medical engineer stakeholders should be better connected to each other. And on-going, start-ups, small and mid-sized businesses need more support during their certification process within EU.

As one solution for these problems an online platform for the medical engineering community in Germany was proposed.

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Some findings of my master thesis about biosensing are published in the new book:

The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World

Edited by Patrícia Vieira; Monica Gagliano and John Ryan

Together with Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, we wrote the chapter 13 The Art of Human to Plant Interaction. If you want to see videos of these featured Human Plant Interaction, please check: Biosensing for Human Computer Interactions

Please feel free to post your Feedback about our chapter!

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For almost more than a year I wanted to write a tutorial about how to create a speaker on a leaf. Unfortunately, I found no time to write one. I think it is now time to show you the video as an example and provide you the links for built your own leaf speaker

Long time ago I started posting my last summary of my Twitter messages. It is always a nice way to reexperience the developments of a certain time period. For this reason my most important Twitter messages from Ocotber 2014 until January 2015. Read more...

The human perception responds positively on natural environments with many plants. Especially, during the seasons spring and autumn people are excited by the shape and colours of plants. The photo series “Season Patterns” is an artistic approach of capturing and documenting these feelings of beauty caused by nature [Schwepenhäuser2007, pages 70-71].

Previous landscape painters already tried to capture the broad range of natural elegance in their artworks. Their approaches were very often accurate in every detail of the landscape, but still the painters were not satisfied with their visual representations of the landscapes. For this reason, the photo series “Season Patterns” uses a visual abstract expression for representing the prettiness of nature and plants.

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The theoretical and practical part of this thesis proposed techniques and applications for Human Plant Interfaces. The results of the qualitative analysis and the practical work exposed evidences for the relevance of the topic Human Plant Interaction.

The theoretical analysis pointed out that plants are a valid material for visualization applications. The applied techniques are heavily depending on the data characteristics. For long term data visualization the usage of plant displays with their changing appearance ability through plants growth is an appropriate tool. In contrast to this, visualizing real-time data requires a different approach. Simple data values or the visualizations of state changes in an interactive system can be performed through kinetic gestures of a plant (e.g. movement of branches). More complex data can be visualized with the help of projection mapping techniques. The physical size of these visualizations varied from small (table-size) to huge.

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The last introduced projects were characterized by its approach of attaching data to a plant. In this project “Charisma Garden” (2013 - 2014), the data will be directly integrated in the health and growth process of a plant. In comparison to the “Travelling Plants” and “Dead Tree Project”, the data is not added to the plant then rather the representation of the data is the plant by itself in this project. In relation to the chapter “3.1. Visualizing techniques with plants” on page 44, the “Charisma Garden” project can be assigned to the category plant displays and takes over the role as a data sculpture. This dynamic (visually changing) data sculpture presents the social activity of a Facebook user.

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Long time ago I posted my last summary of my Twitter messages, however for me it is always a nice way to reexperience the developments of a time period. For this reason my most important Twitter messages from July 2013 until October 2014. Read more...