in recent years, our research has expanded to include designing services. Therefore, we are becoming more and more interested in designing mobile and online applications. We are slowly growing some experience in that area, but we definitely need to have more in-house expertise in the coming years. • The LINKX prototype. • The SnowGlobe prototype.

How would you describe how people interact in your lab? There is an informal atmosphere, with no particular hierarchy, and nobody is secretive about their work. Communication continues in shared coffee or lunch breaks, or when someone is working on a weird prototype whose purpose is unclear. Our website ( www.studiolab.nl) is used mainly for external communication. It has profile pages of all the researchers, including related courses, publications, and design projects. The only two formal weekly events are a weekly opening and a StudioLabTalk. Every Monday morning, lab members gather and share any upcoming events or events of the past week. These range from conference visits to museum exhibitions or documentary films, as long as they somehow relate to ID-StudioLab work. On Wednesday afternoons, one lab member gives a talk about his or her work for an audience of about 20 to 30 colleagues. This may be a proposal for a study, an overview of recent work, or, for example, a practice round for a conference presentation. Occasionally, guests of the school and visiting researchers are invited to share their ideas and work with the lab.

Example Projects

LINKX for children with autism disorder.

Children with autism are often behind in language development. LINKX is an interactive toy that supports children with autism in learning their first 100 words. Children play with blocks that emit the words of everyday objects as audio samples. For example, by connecting a block to a toy truck, the block will say, “Toy truck.” Helma van Rijn | [e-mail]

Exploring crowdsourcing as a formative user research tool. The research is revealing advantages of quickly and easily gaining a lot of input from a large and diverse population, as well as uncertainty in accepting user information from people who are not explicitly selected from the target population. This knowledge has been used to develop a framework and guidelines for practical applications. Brian Tidball | [e-mail]

SnowGlobe is a presence lamp that supports social connectedness between two people. Two globes are connected over the Internet; when one detects motion, the other will shine brighter. We studied how such presence systems are used in daily life and how the key design decisions affected the user experience of social well-being. The prototype was used in field studies that lasted over six months. Thomas Visser | [e-mail]

What is the one thing you see as most important about what you do here? Promoting design as part of scientific research, and vice versa.

DOI: 10.1145/2168931.2168950 © 2012 ACM 1072-5220/12/05 $10.00

Designing rich user-product experiences through negative emotions. Negative emotions play a crucial role in the enjoyment of entertainment forms like film, music, and video games: Thriller movies frighten us, poignant music saddens us, and video games frustrate us. This project investigates how negative emotions can be deliberately applied in design to create richer user-product experiences. Steven Fokkinga | [e-mail]